Peter Brugger, Florian Weber, and Rüdiger Linhof have been playing together since the mid-1990s, when they started out under the name Stiller in Germering, a small town just outside Munich. They picked up the Sportfreunde part once they realized another band already had a claim on the shorter name, and the trio hasn't needed a lineup change since Linhof joined on bass in 1997.
The band's biggest year came in 2006, when their song '54, '74, '90, 2006 became the unofficial anthem of Germany's World Cup summer and shot to number one. Albums like Die gute Seite, Burli, and Sturm & Stille built a catalogue full of the same wry, wordplay-heavy humor that runs through their songwriting, and they're still at it: JEDER NUR EIN X arrived in 2022, nearly three decades after they started out in Germering.