Uli Hoeness has thrown in the towel. So far as he is concerned it is all over for Bayern Munich. The club’s general manager was not just talking about the Champions League quarterfinal loss to Chelsea, his fatalism was more severe than that. The gloom descended over the long-term outlook for German clubs in European competition.
Hoeness’s aim was to warn of the financial disadvantages of sides in the Bundesliga and he calculated that, for example, Juventus will have almost £300-million more to spend over the next five years than Bayern. He was trying to highlight the gulf in revenue from ticket sales and, above all, television rights, but in the process Hoeness could not avoid illustrating how entrancingly different Germany is from all the other nations in football.
Even if it does stand in the centre of the continent, it is a place apart. Bayern lost in the quarterfinals and Werder Bremen, the domestic title-holders, were hurled out of the Champions League by Lyon on a 10-2 aggregate, yet the sport is not in disgrace. Germany has the highest league attendances of any country and Bayern’s new Allianz stadium, which opens next month with a 66 000 capacity, is sold out until 2010.
Audiences are lured by a vividly competitive Bundesliga and by prices that start at about £7. The culture of the sport makes it barren ground for most commercial initiatives. Pay-TV coverage is, for example, offered by Premiere but, despite improvement in its overall position, it still posted losses of £57-million in the most recent accounts. Germans are notorious, so far as businessmen are concerned, for their reluctance to subscribe to cable channels.
Football spectators feel fulfilled by the ritual that has them going to a game on a Saturday and then heading home to watch Bundesliga highlights shown by the state broadcaster ARD at 6.15pm. With football readily available in a quantity and at an hour so suitable to the public, Premiere are handicapped. Any effort to alter those arrangements would be resented and resisted throughout the land.
There are, however, some marked consequences, and the pay-per-view rights to football are, at about £210-million a year, worth half of those in, say, France. The Bundesliga’s overseas appeal is of offbeat character. Its fixtures make for primetime viewing in China, where the German Klaus Schlappner was once a celebrated figure as coach of the national team.
That is no help to Hoeness since China, for all its size, is a niche market so far as television money is concerned. The general manager also appreciates that he is going against the grain of German football in his yearning for a more commercial environment. There are no counterparts to Roman Abramovich or Silvio Berlusconi in a land where clubs are generally owned by their members. Bayern did turn themselves into a limited company, but that was so Adidas could take a 10% stake. The remaining shares are not traded.
Entrepreneurs got a bad name, too, because of the reckless spending of Borussia Dortmund. The club floated itself on the stock exchange and, despite an immense following in the Ruhr, has since had to sell its stadium and lease it back on poor terms. It also appears that Dortmund, in the same fashion, are no longer the real owners of players such as Tomas Rosicky, who is sometimes claimed to be a target for Tottenham.
With careful budgeting essential, the focus throughout the country is on home-grown talent. That is good news for the hosts of the World Cup, since youngsters such as Bayern’s Bastian Schweinsteiger gather experience, but it is of no avail in marketing a Bundesliga that is short on glamour across the globe.
While German football thrives domestically, the aspirations of clubs like Bayern are in poor health. For a while Hoeness thought that prudence would triumph once foreign rivals were consumed by debt. Abramovich, however, has upset his calculations, not only by pumping unimagined sums into Chelsea but also, in the process, by raising transfer prices to such an extent that improvident Marseille could bail themselves out of trouble by selling Didier Drogba to Stamford Bridge for £24-million.
Bayern continue to be a substantial institution, but a handful of clubs in England, Italy and Spain can expect to be far richer. Defeat by Chelsea drove home Hoeness’s point but the average, contented German fan may not care in the slightest. — Â