A German football club is threatening legal action against its own fans after antisemitic and racist chants were heard at a Munich away game on Saturday.

Chemnitzer FC, which plays in the German third division, issued a statement on Saturday evening justifying their legal threat, saying the club “utterly rejects” the chanting from the away end during the second half of the match against Bayern Munich's second team.

According to the same statement, fans called the club's sporting director Thomas Sobotzik a “Jewish pig” and unfurled a banner reading: “We won’t let ourselves be blackmailed!”

Fans also chanted: “At least Daniel Frahn is not a negro.”

Mr Frahn, the former club captain, was sacked earlier this month after his overt support for a local far-right hooligan group reached a head for the club.

The club has been involved a long-running battle with a far-right and neo-Nazi contingent within its fan base over the past few years — something that has turned many upstanding fans away from the club.

In March, a large group of fans held a minute’s silence following the death of the team's former head of security, Thomas Haller. In the 1990s, Haller founded the far-right hooligan group HooNaRa, short for ‘Hooligans Nazis Racists’.

The city of Chemnitz, located in the eastern province of Saxony, was the scene of far-right demonstrations in 2018 and is well-known as a hotspot for neo-Nazi groups, such as the National Socialist Underground organisation.