In Group F of the Champions League, Borussia Dortmund are the odd one out.
There are two petrol-state-funded sides in Paris Saint-Germain (Qatar) and Newcastle United (Saudi Arabia), plus AC Milan, owned by U.S. private equity group RedBird Capital. Finally, in the yellow corner, stand Dortmund — the sole member-controlled club.
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“There’s a certain charm and irony to this draw,” Nina T, a 42-year-old BVB season ticket holder on the ‘Yellow Wall’ stand and contributor to fan blog schwatzgelb.de tells The Athletic, recalling a series of (ultimately successful) supporter protests at Signal Iduna Park against the league selling media rights to an investor earlier this year.
Organised fans in Germany remain staunch defenders of the 50+1 regulations that prevent club takeovers and leave members in charge. Being bought by sheikhs, oligarchs or men from Wall Street is the stuff of nightmares, not dreams, on Bundesliga terraces.
Dortmund fans protest private equity investment in May 2023 (Lars Baron/Getty Images)“You can watch a football game like a film in the cinema, you can be a passenger,” Nina explains. “I don’t begrudge Paris Saint-Germain, Kylian Mbappe, honestly not. They are a cool lifestyle brand for kids, but football is more than entertainment and consumption. It’s about active participation for 90 minutes and beyond.
“It’s about having an influence on your club and ensuring that it upholds certain values — in Borussia’s case an active stance against racism, sexism and antisemitism, for example. It’s about being part of something bigger. You cheer a goal differently on the stands when you achieve something together, when it’s really your club rather than somebody else’s, handing you success on a platter.”
Outside Germany, that strength of feeling isn’t always appreciated. People look at Dortmund and wonder why their supporters wouldn’t want more investment to bridge the annual €200million (£172m; $213m) gap in turnover in relation to serial champions Bayern Munich, or why clubs lower down the pecking order don’t pine for a fairy godmother turning them from pumpkin into solid gold overnight.
But it’s a different football culture with different priorities. “I don’t support Dortmund because of the trophies, as nice as they are,” Nina says. “I don’t really care about ‘keeping up’ with Bayern or big teams in Europe either. I don’t want to trade the sense of having a voice for silverware. People feel disempowered enough in society as it is. It’s very important to me that football doesn’t lose that communal spirit.”
Jan-Henrik Gruszecki, a BVB ultra who now works as chief of staff for strategy and culture at Borussia, told The Athletic in 2020: “When a club is sold, it loses part of its soul and identity. It’s like having a really good friend you’ve stuck with through good and bad times suddenly winning the lottery and becoming a completely different person, no longer interested in you.”
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It’s worth mentioning at this point that Dortmund aren’t ideologically pure, either. The club are still listed on the stock market and, just like Bayern, they have strategic minority shareholders in kit suppliers Puma (5.3 per cent), stadium name sponsors Signal Iduna (six per cent), and former shirt sponsors Evonik (8.2 per cent). But the big difference is they, and most Bundesliga sides, are still run by local people who are morally and legally accountable to their members. They can be dispensed with through public pressure or with a vote of no confidence at the annual general meeting.
There are also historical reasons why the German outlook remains completely different. The Bundesliga was set up with semi-professional sides organised as members’ associations 60 years ago: there’s neither England’s century-old legacy of club ownership nor any recent examples of successful sporting transformations of traditional sides, such as Chelsea under Roman Abramovich or Manchester City under Abu Dhabi United Group.
On top of that, there’s a deep distrust of investors, ideological concerns aside, because many attempts to change established clubs’ fortunes through the injection of outside funds have not worked out. 1860 Munich (third division) and Hertha BSC (Bundesliga 2) are both on the hook to problematic financiers. Dortmund themselves nearly did “a Leeds” just over 20 years ago. Their near-bankruptcy in 2005 is etched deeply in the collective psyche of German football, a stark warning that money can be both the cure and the cause of many ills.
In the mid-90s, they aggressively spent new TV riches on Germany internationals, such as Jurgen Kohler, Andreas Moller, Karl-Heinz Riedle and Matthias Sammer, to become the Bundesliga’s second force. Two league titles and the 1997 Champions League triumph, in Munich’s Olympiastadion of all places, encouraged them further to challenge Bayern’s hegemony. They brought in stars such as Tomas Rosicky (Sparta Prague) and Marcio Amoroso (Udinese) for record sums and even hijacked Bayern’s deal with Sebastian Kehl by paying the 21-year-old SC Freiburg midfielder higher wages.
Tomas Rosicky was a big-money signing for Borussia Dortmund (Stuart Franklin/Getty Images)Income alone could soon no longer finance the reckless spree. In 2000, Dortmund broke with tradition when they became the first — and to this day only — German club to go public, selling 143 DM of shares (€71.5m) to mostly institutional investors. (The running of the football club was outsourced to a new limited company to comply with 50+1 regulations.) Those funds were badly needed to cover a wide array of liabilities. Chairman Gerhard Niebaum and CEO Michael Meier had secretly pulled plenty of ‘levers’, selling off the stadium, selling off the transfer rights to Rosicky and others and even the marketing rights to Borussia Dortmund’s name and logo. Total debts hit €239million.
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That house of credit cards came crashing down the moment Dortmund missed out on Champions League qualification in 2003. Two years later, Dortmund were close to going out of business altogether. “I remember being shocked to hear the television news announcer talk about the club’s insolvency,” Nina says.
New CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke saved the club by bringing in fresh funds from U.S. bank Morgan Stanley, who loaned them €79m in 2006 and took over 30 per cent of the plc. The terms of the deal were arduous for BVB. They were forced to cut back on the team budget and pay high interest rates for 15 years. Mid-table stasis loomed large.
Off the pitch, their fortunes improved, however. Dortmund cleverly spent the money on buying back Signal Iduna Park and then got lucky when the financial crisis of 2008 put huge pressure on Morgan Stanley to raise capital themselves. The bank sold their shares and then agreed to BVB exiting the credit agreement 13 years early with the help of local banks and halving their debt to €69m in the process. That same year, Jurgen Klopp took charge. The sporting rebuild that ensued re-established BVB among the top 15 wealthiest clubs by turnover a couple of years later.
Jurgen Klopp transformed Dortmund’s fortunes (Patrik Stollarz/AFP via Getty Images)Their strong backing for financial fair play — which recently led to a flare-up with PSG — is partially born out of experience. They understand what happens when spending knows no bounds, but there’s also a more prosaic element to that stance, one that is being shared almost universally across professional football in Germany. As self-sustaining clubs, they can only hope to compete if spending remains tied to organic income. The alternative would be submitting to an arms race bound to destroy traditions.
Will things fundamentally change once everybody tires of Bayern winning 20 titles in a row? Nina doesn’t think so. “There will always be people who want to be with the winners, who want that taste of winning and will hope that money will bring that,” she says. “But my feeling is that things are actually moving in the opposite direction. There’s a new generation that are very aware that there’s limit to growth. We can’t always have more, more, more.”
She considers the league clubs’ recent rejection of the proposed investment deal as a sign that German football still doesn’t believe that money is the answer. “You can try to put more in but you will never catch up with the big boys. You can’t solve that problem financially, but perhaps you can solve it on the pitch.
“Look at the clubs who have come up in the league in recent years, Union Berlin and SC Freiburg. They got to where they are by having an identity, an idea, and getting everyone on board. The system is what it is but it still allows for glitches. We should focus on that, rather than on selling out.”
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Even in this Champions League, she adds, Borussia Dortmund should take strength from previous heroics. “We were in a ‘Group of Death’ in 2012-13 (with Real Madrid, Manchester City and Ajax) and qualified, going all the way to the final. We didn’t have star players then, only players who became stars. Those on the pitch and in the stands will try everything they can to rock this thing again. Let’s see what we can do on Tuesday.”
(Top photo: Alex Grimm/Getty Images)
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