The Bundesliga Knife-Edge: German Football at a Crossroads

In few places is the tension between the business of football and its cultural roots and traditions more palpable than in the Bundesliga. As an expert on German football and fan culture, Matt Ford assesses a difficult moment for clubs and their supporters, now exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

September 2020

Rancour in Sinsheim

Even before coronavirus brought last season's Bundesliga to a temporary halt, there was a feeling that German football had reached a crossroads. On 29 February, with FC Bayern München 6-0 up away at TSG 1899 Hoffenheim, the match was halted and the players taken off the pitch after FC Bayern supporters unfurled a number of banners that insulted the home team's owner Dietmar Hopp and criticised the German Football Association (DFB). When the players returned, they played out the remaining 30 minutes in a truce, casually passing the ball to each other and running the clock down. All the while, the commentator on Sky television raged profusely about the "hooligans" in the stands who were "destroying the game." Like many headline writers that evening and the next day, however, he seemed unable or at least unwilling to explain exactly why Bayern's hardcore support had risked the match being abandoned.

The immediate motivation had been a so-called collective punishment issued to Borussia Dortmund supporters by the DFB for similar banners. Rather than punish only those responsible, all BVB fans received a blanket ban from away games in Hoffenheim for two seasons. In issuing the ban, the DFB had reneged on a commitment to end collective punishments. This perceived breach of trust was the immediate cause of the fans' ire. The secondary reason could be found in the content of the banners themselves: insulting messages labelling Hopp a "son of a whore." Hopp, one of Germany’s wealthiest businesspeople, is an unpopular figure among many German fans having bankrolled Hoffenheim's rise from the village leagues to the UEFA Champions League to the tune of over €350 million.

The footballing model represented by Hopp in Hoffenheim – and also by Dietrich Mateschitz’s Red Bull in Leipzig – is considered by Germany's active fan groups to embody the over-commercialisation of the game, a model in which capital is king and which runs roughshod over the fundamental principles at the heart of German football culture: participation, engagement, democracy, and the 50+1 ownership rule. Those cornerstones have underpinned numerous high-profile fan protests in German football down the years: the fight against Monday fixtures, the Kein Zwanni (Twenty's Plenty) ticket price protests, and the "12:12" campaign against a draconian security concept which envisaged personalised tickets, increased surveillance, and the abolition of standing terraces. The same principles also form the basis of much socio-political campaigning in German football, where anti-racism, anti-discrimination, and anti-homophobia initiatives are common.

Indeed, it did not go unnoticed in supporter circles that it had taken insulting banners aimed at a white billionaire to almost provoke the abandonment of a Bundesliga match. There had been no such outcry two weeks earlier when Hertha BSC's Jordan Torunarigha was the victim of racist abuse. Instead, the distressed player ended up being sent off. As images of the FC Bayern and Hoffenheim players’ walk-off went viral, fundamental questions were posed: What does German football stand for? What does it want to be? Who is it ultimately for? Can it remain the people's game, in which supporters are more than just passive consumers? Or does it belong to the likes of Hopp and FC Bayern chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, to those who pay the most? If anybody thought the subsequent arrival of the coronavirus would put such questions on the back burner, they could not have been more wrong.

When the Bundesliga restarted in mid-May, the first major European league to do so, there was no more hiding the reason why. Without games to televise, broadcasters would have refused to pay the fourth and final instalment of the league's 2019-20 television rights payments, worth €304 million to the 36 clubs in the top two divisions. Without that money, 13 of those clubs were reported to be facing potential insolvency within months. The German Football League (DFL) had no choice. "Yes, we produce a product," admitted CEO Christian Seifert, who has skilfully guided German football through the pandemic. "If we don't have this product, we won't exist." A meticulous hygiene concept was drawn up to allow games to take place and the season was successfully concluded.

Not included in the hygiene concept, of course, were match-going fans. But with Sky reporting record viewing figures (at least on that first weekend back), a long-held suspicion became abundantly clear: TV viewers are more important than stadium-goers. The televised product had been preserved and continued very much as normal. Matches took place, players scored goals, competitions were won, pundits analysed tactics, and journalists conducted interviews. Viewers could even listen to fake crowd noise if they wanted to, while lip service was paid to the absence of fans. But they were hollow phrases. German football's unique, vibrant, and envied fan culture (below) had been shown to be of secondary economic importance. The show was going on regardless across Europe, culminating in FC Bayern’s sixth UEFA Champions League triumph at a mini tournament in Lisbon.

“The greatest spectacle ever”

In normal times, a continental triumph for the Bavarian behemoth would be scorned by supporters of other clubs, such is Germany's love-hate relationship with the perennial domestic champions. But this time, reactions bordered largely on indifference, and even relief, in fact, that it was not Paris Saint-Germain or – God forbid – RB Leipzig. The very presence of Qatari-owned PSG and the Red Bull-backed Bundesliga side in the semi-finals, not to mention Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City who were knocked out in the previous round, constituted a liberal sprinkling of salt in the wounds of supporters who had already been sidelined by football in the age of coronavirus. Elite super clubs representing nation states and energy drink brands competing in a hermetically sealed environment without fans, purely for the benefit of television: a dystopian vision of football had become a stark reality.

"The greed knows no limits," read graffiti tags sprayed on walls and streets around Lisbon’s Estádio da Luz by one group of hardcore Bayern supporters who had followed their team to Portugal. "Football for the people, not for millions of euros," read a banner outside nearby Estádio José Alvalade. Simultaneously, back in Munich, a member of the same fan group was in court appealing an indefinite club ban handed to him for displaying an "anti-Mondays" banner at a reserve match. The supporter in question, who in January helped to organise a podium discussion on human rights, also happens to be a vocal critic of FC Bayern's own sponsorship dealings with the state of Qatar.

A critical stance towards one's own club is a key element of German fan culture – something which may come as a surprise to some supporters of Premier League teams, if recent debates surrounding Manchester City's Financial Fair Play hearings or the proposed takeover of Newcastle United by Saudi Arabia are anything to go by. But with the 50+1 rule ensuring that a club's members retain majority control, including at FC Bayern, German fans have a legal, democratic stake in their clubs, rather than the purely emotional stake which their English counterparts have in theirs. Not only does this connection underpin the vibrant fan culture expressed on the surface by spectacular choreographies and stadium atmospheres, it also encourages fans to hold their clubs to account.

When Rummenigge called the mini tournament format in Lisbon "the greatest spectacle I have ever experienced," it was not hard to imagine that the absence of an irritating, critical fan culture pointing out the game's flaws and hypocrisies and acting as a brake on the creeping commercialisation of the sport suited him perfectly.

A social, political, and financial knife-edge

Nevertheless, domestically at least, match-going fans are not entirely economically irrelevant. Last season, Bundesliga clubs lost an average of €1.5 million per Geisterspiel – or ghost game, as matches behind closed doors are known in Germany. And the bigger the stadium, the bigger the losses: Borussia Dortmund reported a total minus of €44 million due to the pandemic, including €15 million in missing matchday revenue from five home games at the 81,365-capacity Westfalenstadion. It is no wonder that clubs are keen to get fans back through the turnstiles in 2020-21, but the ongoing pandemic means that numbers will be limited, and hygiene measures will be strict. Standing terraces are likely to remain closed, with supporters allocated individual, socially distanced seats, while tickets will be personalised to facilitate contact tracing in case of infection.

Although generally accepted as necessary in the short term, such conditions are hardly conducive to an active, independent fan culture, and many supporters fear that, once implemented to combat the coronavirus, such measures could be made permanent. Indeed, the president of the regional football association in Saxony has already expressed just such a wish: "I think the topic of personalised tickets is interesting […] perhaps we can use them for other things in future," Hermann Winkler told public broadcaster ARD. "I'm thinking about [preventing] the use of pyrotechnics and outbreaks of violence, that's something we can think about with the clubs."

In a statement, Unsere Kurve, Germany's largest nationwide fan initiative, explicitly called on clubs to commit to repealing coronavirus security measures once the pandemic is over. "A further expansion of the security apparatus around German football […] will endanger our unique fan culture significantly," said spokeswoman Helen Breit. "The debate around personalised tickets simply perpetuates the image of football fans as a security threat, a categorisation we explicitly reject. Our stadiums are safe and will remain so in future. No further measures are needed." But the wheels already seem to be in motion. At the start of September, representatives of nine clubs in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia signed a "stadium alliance against violence" with the local police and interior ministry. The stated aim is to combat violence in football stadiums, despite the police's own figures (collated annually by the Zentrale Informationsstelle Sporteinsätze, or ZIS) showing a consistent decrease in both injuries and criminal charges around football matches.

The same month, news magazine Der Spiegel reported that funding for Germany's network of "Fan Projects" is to be cut. Fan Projects, funded in equal part by the DFB and the state, are pedagogical and educational organisations which employ professional social workers to work with young football supporters and liaise with clubs and authorities. They are largely credited with the reduction of violence and political extremism in German football grounds.

The 50+1 rule: to whom does football belong?

This summer over 2,600 fan clubs and almost 14,000 individuals signed up to support a new nationwide fan initiative, Unser Fußball (Our Football), which is demanding that clubs and federations fundamentally restructure the game to make it sustainable for the future. Among the demands which have been submitted to the DFB and DFL are a redistribution of TV money to promote fair competition, a recognition of football's social responsibilities, sustainable financing, and a commitment to a democratic and engaged fan culture. Of greatest importance to the fans behind Unser Fußball is the retention of the 50+1 rule. This pivotal regulation, which stipulates that a club must always retain 50 percent of its own shares plus one share in order to guarantee a majority stake, has already come under threat in recent years.

In 2015 Hoffenheim became the third club after VfL Wolfsburg and Bayer 04 Leverkusen to be officially granted an exemption by proving that Hopp had supported the club substantially and consistently for twenty years. In Leipzig, meanwhile, Red Bull have circumvented the rule by only permitting 19 members, all of whom are directly or indirectly linked to the main sponsor. Both Martin Kind at Hannover 96 and Hasan Ismaik at TSV 1860 München have previously threatened to appeal against the legality of the ruling in the European Courts, and with clubs now under added financial pressure due to the pandemic, there have been predictable calls from the usual suspects to lift restrictions on ownership and open up German clubs to greater investment. Critics of the rule argue that 50+1 puts German clubs at a financial disadvantage, unable to compete with FC Bayern domestically or Europe's best internationally. Advocates, on the other hand, point to the social and cultural elements of German football which are at risk when clubs are controlled by owners intent on profit.

And so, as the new season begins amid the social, political, and financial devastation of the coronavirus, German football is at a crossroads. Have Geisterspiele disproven the adage that football without fans – particularly match-going fans – is nothing? And even if fans are needed back in stadiums, will the authorities use the pandemic as an excuse to ramp up surveillance and ensure that they get the stadium audiences they want: passive, consumerist, and non-critical? Moreover, without scrutiny from critical supporters, will potential owners and investors use the success of Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, and RB Leipzig in the Champions League to argue that 50+1 is obsolete?

The final whistle is approaching, and this game could still go either way.

Matt Ford is a freelance journalist on German football and fan culture, and contributor to Deutsche Welle.

Words: Matt Ford | Imagery: Valentin B. Kremer; Imago; Offside