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abstract: 'The [[*Planck*]{}]{} mission is the most sensitive all-sky CMB experiment currently planned. The High Frequency Instrument ([[*HFI*]{}]{}) will be especially suited to observe clusters of galaxies by their thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effect. In order to assess [[*Planck*]{}’s ]{} SZ-capabilities in the presence of spurious signals, a simulation is presented that combines maps of the thermal and kinetic SZ-effects with a realisation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), in addition to Galactic foregrounds (synchrotron emission, free-free emission, thermal emission from dust, CO-line radiation) as well as the sub-millimetric emission from celestial bodies of our Solar system. Additionally, observational issues such as the finite angular resolution and spatially non-uniform instrumental noise of [[*Planck*]{}’s ]{}sky maps are taken into account, yielding a set of all-sky flux maps, the auto-correlation and cross-correlation properties of which are examined in detail. In the second part of the paper, filtering schemes based on scale-adaptive and matched filtering are extended to spherical data sets, that enable the amplification of the weak SZ-signal in the presence of all contaminations stated above. The theory of scale-adaptive and matched filtering in the framework of spherical maps is developed, the resulting filter kernel shapes are discussed and their functionality is 