Inevitable need for change – identifying and removing barriers to supporter participation in German professional football

Abstract

This article aims to increase an understanding of the German football governance system. We seek to achieve our objective, by summarizing and collating findings from two research projects on supporter governance using a mixed-methods approach since 2011. The first project has focused on the ‘50 + 1 Rule’, which stipulates that all professional football clubs need to be run as member’s associations or majority-controlled by member’s associations. The second project has focused on the articles of association of the clubs, which regulate the governance structures and processes that allow supporter participation in every individual club. Our research suggests that loopholes in the ‘50 + 1 Rule’ and weak definitions of club-specific provisions in the articles of association present considerable barriers to supporter participation. We suggest removing these barriers to preserve the historically grown German model of supporter governance. Otherwise, a transformation into a corporate model of football governance seems to be inevitable.

Keywords:

• 50 + 1 Rule
• member’s association
• stakeholder approach
• supporter governance
• membership-based barriers

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See § 16c No. 3 Articles of Association German Football Association and § 8 No. 3 Articles of Association German Football League Association.

2 These exceptions were approved since the two football clubs have originally been company sports teams. Bayer Leverkusen was founded in 1904 by employees of the Bayer Corporation, which was based in the city. VfL Wolfsburg was founded in 1945, and has historically been affiliated with the car manufacturer Volkswagen.

3 The Ständiges Schiedsgericht für Vereine und Kapitalgesellschaften der Lizenzligen acts as a permanent court of arbitration between the German Football League Association and the German Football Association on the one hand and the professional football clubs competing in Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 on the other.

4 According to the German newspaper TAZ, the co-founder and former CEO of the German IT company SAP supported the member’s association, the professional football corporation, as well as infrastructure projects of the club financially with some €279.2 million since the early 1990s, which was considered as a continuous and significant support of the club over a period of 20 years by the German Football Association (Joram 2017).

5 Within their circular Rundschreiben Nr. 30 Bereich Recht DFL, which on 12 December 2014 was sent by email to all 36 clubs affiliated with the German Football League Association (clubs from Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2), and was available to the German newspaper TAZ, the German Football League Association specifies in Article 6 the relevant provisions in their statutes: ‘According to the board, the notion “significant” is to be understood in relation to a football club, in the sense that the extent of a financial engagement in each single season during the 20-year-period should at least amount to the average budget that the main sponsorship, i.e. the largest single sponsorship, contributes’ (Joram 2017). However, we need to criticize that this specification is not enshrined in the German Football Association’s and German Football League Association’s statutes and the circular is not publicly available, and, therefore, does not contribute to more transparency in this regard.

6 In the sense that the football club runs different departments, such as an amateur football department and in the case of a multi-sports-club also other professional and amateur sports.