Buch traditional club calls for reform, criticises football funders
In the small sound studio of Saarland and Frankfurt, Georg Haas and Bastian Roth, the two energetic journalists, sit and discuss their new book “Pro modern football, but without bullshit”. They want to develop strategies to save German professional football, and they loudly ask: How can football become better with less bullshit?
Criticism of the Bundesliga Structure
The authors ask which teams should play in the Bundesliga based on their attendance figures. They name Hamburg as worthy, but not Mainz, and describe this view as “strangely conservative”. Furthermore they criticize the “Augsburgisation” of the league, because only a few clubs achieve high attendance numbers.
Freiburg and Mainz each attract about 30 000 people to the stadium, while traditional clubs such as Bochum and Braunschweig draw significantly fewer spectators. According to the journalists, there are about ten clubs in Germany that can count more than 50 000 spectators in good periods. The remaining eight to nine clubs are not the central problem.
Proposals for Reforming German Football
Haas and Roth propose a salary cap and discuss a possible exit of FC Bayern Munich into a Super League. The German champion is usually Bayern Munich. They call for the removal of the exemption rules for Leverkusen, Hoffenheim, Wolfsburg and Leipzig. Moreover, they argue that popular clubs such as Cologne or Hamburg should receive more TV money, because their matches are in higher demand.
A central argument of the two journalists is the retention of the 50+1 rule, because in their view it secures stadium occupancy. They emphasize that fans only come regularly if they feel they have influence over the club. Without this rule, many clubs would be deprived of their societal significance, they claim.
International Comparison with the Premier League
In capitalist England, where the Premier League is the top league, significantly more people attend the stadiums. The authors show that even clubs with fewer than one hundred thousand members can hardly mobilise a thousand members to vote on club matters. They criticize that this low democratic participation does not meet the ideal.
In the following chapters, Haas and Roth plan to deepen their analysis and discuss new concepts such as a weekly merging of various European leagues or a derby weekend with Italian and German teams. However, they use many pages to defend the 50+1 rule, which shortens the discussion somewhat.
The book is aimed at anyone who critically questions German football, and is available via the official app. The two journalists hope that their proposals will spark debate and lead in the long term to a more sustainable league.