How many finals have Germany been in?

Is Germany big on soccer?

If you're a Briton, the answer is yes, but you need to watch the games with a German voice-over.

We've got four months of daylight, says my German voice-over, and six months of darkness. And in the middle, we have seven months of summer.

It's hard to take that seriously. We might have a day longer than Britain, but we've got a longer winter.

Still, we get our share of sunshine. The summer isn't as scorchingly hot as it is here.

And when it comes to soccer, Germany is world-beater. And it's not just because of the record 11 World Cups and 10 European Championships they've won.

It's the way they play the game. They're much more defensive than the other countries, and they like it that way.

They like a game where the ball goes slowly and carefully into the box. In Germany, the goalie is king.

The country is so obsessed with the game that we call it ''sport'', rather than ''football''. It's called ''Eishockey'' in Germany, or ''Volleyball''.

In Britain, soccer is our game. We play for fun. We cheer. And we lose.

There's no sense of achievement in losing. There are no defeats.

But we still win the most games. In the World Cup, the host nation always wins the most games. In the last round of the World Cup, the defending champions (Germany) only won one game. So we take some comfort from that. But the Germans don't. A German team is always confident, even if they don't win. I was in a bar in Munich the other day, watching a game of American football. A German team was coming up against the US on the TV screen. They were losing 2-1.

When the final whistle went, everyone in the bar started yelling ''USA!

How many football teams does Germany have?

A mere nine at the moment, which is to be expected given Germany's record of recent footballing futility.

But in a few days' time Germany will play its first match for this campaign, a friendly with Denmark which holds little fear for the home side as they continue their journey up the Uefa Pro-league, also known as the Europa League, where clubs from the continent's strongest leagues will be playing against each other as they compete to play in next summer's UEFA Champions League. And while their German neighbours - with many more teams to offer fans - compete as best they can for qualification for the prestigious Champions League, and as many fans believe it will be the last chance Germany's small clubs get to play in Europe (in stark contrast to the likes of Italy, Spain or France where this was not true for even when many smaller, second-tier teams did qualify and even compete in it), the Bundesliga's biggest club Bayern Munich have never even attempted qualification for the Champions League. That's right, just one of Bayern's six Bundesliga titles, the three European Cups they have already secured and a treble here in Germany has been in the club's history so far, and yet only once in Germany has the club qualified for the Champions League proper. So Bayern Munich's record when you take the whole of history in Germany since the formation of this country in 1871 until that point into account is the following: Bayern Munich has won all of the German Championships except for the one they have never qualified for - the biggest club in Germany playing against the smallest ones in domestic German football. So the question is - why? Bayern are, of course, among the very best teams in the world. With their most recent treble winning side of 2013/14 they have established themselves as one of the world's big five in all seriousness and with that title comes the respect and honourability of participating in global football tournaments with the likes of Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United and Liverpool.

They are the club who could beat anyone (even Barcelona) and they have the financial muscle to do that and they're now an ever-larger entity than ever in German sport. There must be some sort of reason as to why they're not doing this, so we're going to ask them.