German football has a new controversy – about playing games in the United States

Just as a new matchday comes around, German football has a new controversy — and it concerns potential games in the United States.

The German Football League (DFL), which operates the Bundesliga, announced a partnership with Relevent Sports this week. The American media and entertainment group founded by Stephen Ross, owner of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, will help the league develop its commercial and broadcasting income in the U.S. The Bundesliga will be opening new offices in North, Central and South America and, as a starting point, will stage a pre-season tournament in the region next summer.

What is controversial about any of that? Pre-season tournaments and tours are a standard part of European football. Having strategic partners in profitable markets is sensible and, ultimately, a prerequisite to competing within the modern football landscape.

But these are all third-rail topics in Germany — and even the distant prospect of playing regular matches beyond its borders is hugely sensitive.

To understand why concerns are rising, it’s important to appreciate the dynamics of German football’s current position, its conservative nature and its fear of change.

The Bundesliga is fighting a formidable deficit — illustrated most starkly in the United States market. While the Premier League’s U.S. broadcasting contract with NBC is worth $450million (£338m) per season, the Bundesliga’s equivalent deal with ESPN (due to run until 2026) is valued at $30m. Relevent will help renegotiate that deal when it comes up for renewal.

But without the star power or wealth of the Premier League, or its range of famous clubs, growing the Bundesliga is a challenge needing creative solutions. Harder still, those solutions must be compatible with Germany’s footballing culture, which will always be sensitive to change — and that is why this new relationship between the DFL and Relevent will be a source of contention across the coming weekend.

The context for that is native distrust of commercialism and outside investment.

Professional football only began in (the former West) Germany in 1963, with the launch of the Bundesliga. Compared to England, where football has been professional since 1888, and the other major European Leagues — Italy and Spain (1926) and France (1932) — German football’s relationship with wealth is not the same. Even today, it still possesses hints of amateurism.

In 1998, the growth of TV money across European leagues forced an ideological compromise. Needing to remain continentally competitive, German clubs were permitted for the first time to detach their football departments and run them as limited companies, selling shares and floating them on the stock market if they wished. It was a sea change.

Previously, officials had been unsalaried club members and outside investment in clubs had been impossible. But the step forward came with a condition — and a safeguard. Ultimate control of these new companies had to remain with the members. The original club had to retain 50 per cent of the shares in the new PLC, plus one. That is the ’50+1 rule’.

The stipulation enshrines supporters as stakeholders in the game, thereby protecting the atmosphere, the regionality and the low ticket prices that have all become distinctive Bundesliga characteristics. However, because the regulation also discourages the kind of wholesale investment seen in England, the DFL and its members are pushed towards alternate solutions in pursuit of competitive parity — and when those solutions are perceived to come at the cost of fan influence, the response can be fierce.

Last season offered a pertinent example.

In December, the DFL’s 36 member clubs voted to sell eight per cent of future broadcasting rights for 20 years to CVC, a private equity firm, in exchange for €1billion (£840million; $1.1bn). The revenue from the deal would have been used by the league and clubs for infrastructural improvements, the development of digital marketing assets and the funding of overseas tours aimed at — again — growing overseas income.

But the fans rebelled against it, disrupting games by throwing tennis balls onto pitches and sustaining weeks of well-organised (and sometimes imaginative) protest. The CVC deal, to them, was representative of the over-commercialisation of the sport, and seen as a threat to their own agency. With a private equity firm as a partner for the next few decades, whose interests would be prioritised? Who would lead the important conversations?

For many supporters in Germany, the Premier League is a terrifying prospect. The sky-high ticket prices and rampant commercialism are one issue. The commodification of the sport is another. The great fear, though, is the lack of influence supporters in England have on clubs — and how little recourse they have against bad owners. A disgruntled Premier League supporter can only shout into the void. An unhappy member of a Bundesliga club can actually vote for change.

The DFL’s agreement with Relevent is not the same as the investor deal. Nothing is being sold off or traded away. It will not provoke a reaction anything like as intense — and nor should it.

But German fans will be aware of the global conversation about the staging of domestic league games in other countries and the recently-settled court case between Relevent and FIFA, football’s worldwide governing body. In 2019, Relevent sued FIFA over the organisation’s rules preventing the staging of official games outside a particular league’s home territory.

Bremen goalkeeper Michael Zetterer collects chocolate gold coins thrown onto the pitch in January (Marvin Ibo Guengoer – GES Sportfoto/Getty Images)

FIFA has since been dropped from the lawsuit after saying it is prepared to review its policies, opening the door to the possibility of domestic football fixtures being played abroad. Relevent and La Liga have already said they want to bring a competitive game to the U.S. as soon as possible.

On a Zoom call with The Athletic’s Adam Crafton this week, Steffen Merkel, the DFL’s co-chief executive was asked about the possibility of German football following suit.

“I respect the La Liga approach but it would be more difficult in Germany,” Merkel said. “While I see the benefits from a marketing point of view, our focus must be on things that are realistic. And that’s my perspective at the moment — not competitive games, but rather bringing more clubs to the U.S. consistently before a season and focusing on this in the first step.”

Politically, it would be almost impossible to stage a regular-season Bundesliga game outside Germany. It could not happen without a DFL vote and, because club officials are accountable to supporters, any club voting to take games away from their home region would plunge into civil war.

Christian Seifert, the DFL’s previous chief executive, promised that matches overseas would “never, ever” happen, speaking at a 2018 event in Frankfurt.

Peer Naubert is Bundesliga International’s chief marketing officer and in 2023, he reaffirmed that all league games would stay in Germany.

“The Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 (the German league’s second tier) games and matchdays are so deeply rooted into our societies that it would be very hard — and harsh — to take any of them out into different markets,” Naubert told The Athletic. “There have always been discussions about the Super Cup and that might be something where this ‘never, ever’ doesn’t count as much.”

Fernando Carro, chief executive of reigning Bundesliga champions Bayer Leverkusen, is in favour of exporting the Super Cup — Germany’s pre-season equivalent of English football’s Community Shield. “It would be an option to hold it in the U.S. or another country,” Carro told ESPN during a club event in New York last week. “We have to try new things. This could be an example of that.”

Supporters will naturally wonder what else that might entail. As Merkel says, this is a “first step”. Today, a pre-season tournament. Tomorrow, the Super Cup. The day after, what?

That sounds like a conclusion drawn from a benign remark — an alarmist response, even — but German football is usually pre-emptive with its protests and attentive to any dominos that might fall.

So, there might not be tennis balls on the pitch this weekend, but the DFL can expect to be reminded that those on the terraces are always watching.

(Top photo: Bernd Thissen/picture alliance via Getty Images)