Die Fußball-Bundesliga 2015/16

[Dr Gloom 21760]

sounds very similar to my experience watch st pauli last year johnny. german football is leading the way in europe on all levels. sounds like you had a mint time.

[Tooj 17]

St. Pauli is definitely on the "to watch" list like as apparently them and Union Berlin are the two stand out atmospheres in Germany.

[Meenzer 15347]

And if you've done Berlin, Hamburg is the logical next city to tick off the list.

 

(Well, there's Munich, but we try not to talk about them.)

[Tooj 17]

Divn't forget Dortmund man.

[Meenzer 15347]

For the football definitely, for the tourism less so

[Tooj 17]

http://bundesligafanatic.com/price-of-being-bundesliga-fan/

In English football, it is often said that fans are the lifeblood of the club and that they are what really matters. This line is the clichéd thing for players, managers and owners to repeat. In modern times, however, top-level English professional clubs have viewed fans simply as an alternate source of revenue. Proving this attitude is very easy: you only need to compare what a typical Bundesliga fan pays to support their team compared to an English Premier League fan to see the shocking difference.

1. Ticket Prices

The Supporters not Customers website has compared the many different ticket prices during the 2013-2014 season in both the Premier League and the Bundesliga. The cheapest Premier League season ticket available for an adult was £299 at Manchester City. This price contrasts with £710 at Liverpool, £730 at Tottenham, and £985 at Arsenal.

In the Bundesliga, however, it is possible to get an adult season ticket for Bayern Munich and VfL Wolfsburg for €80. This amount is less than the cost of some single match day tickets for some Premier League teams.

Indeed, the most expensive cheap season ticket in the Bundesliga was found at Schalke 04 and was €190.50, which is still over £100 less expensive than the cheapest Premier League season ticket.

There is, at most, a £110.50 difference in price between the lowest price and highest price Bundesliga season tickets, in the Premier League that difference is £686.

Averaging out the two leagues, the cheapest Premier League season ticket comes in at £503.85, while the average cost of a cheap Bundesliga season ticket, in pounds, is £118.12.

For example, during the 2012-2013 season in the Premier League, Queens Park Rangers fans paid on average £739 in season ticket prices to watch their team get relegated. In the same season, Bayern Munich won the Bundesliga and the Champions League final and their supporters on average paid less than £200 for a season ticket.

What is abundantly clear from this data is that despite massive income from television and other sponsorship deals, clubs in England still charge a vast amount more to supporters wanting to attend matches. It is not uncommon for English supporters to have to pay, two, three or four times what fans of Bundesliga clubs will pay to support their team.

The farcical nature of this situation is underscored by considering that it is cheaper for a football fan in Manchester to buy a season ticket at Werder Bremen and catch a flight to their home matches, than it is for them to buy a season ticket at either Manchester club and then attend the games throughout the course of the season.

2. Transportation

Further evidence that the fan is more central to the Bundesliga’s raison d’etre is apparent when you consider transportation. In the UK, other than very rare and special occasions, most football fans have to foot the bill for their travel costs both to home and away games.

Over the course of a 19 game league season, plus home cup and European games, this cost can add up, even if the fan just attends home games. Obviously, travel costs are markedly higher for fans who follow their team home and away.

Yet in the Bundesliga, travelling to home games as a fan to many cities and towns is very different. A high percentage of Bundesliga clubs work in conjunction with local councils and authorities offering fans cheap or even free travel to and from games.

For fans, their match tickets act as a ‘pass’ on local public transit, allowing away fans to travel into the city for free for the game and back home again. Of course, being Germany, the local transport system is well-run and efficient, meaning that it can easily cope with the influx of extra supporters using the city’s buses, trains, and trams.

However, what is interesting to ponder here is, not that English fans pay more than Bundesliga fans, but asking why they are so happy to do so. Increasingly, the feeling amongst English fans is that you are not a ‘true’ supporter if you are not willing to play the over-inflated prices to purchase football shirts, attend games, buy a programme, or any other piece of football merchandise.

In recent times, football fans in England have increasingly viewed themselves less as part of one large fraternity, but instead have adopted a narrower and more parochial view with their supported club being the only issue that generally matters. As supporters in England increasingly focus on their club alone, club owners are emboldened to charge fans ever-increasing amounts.

In Germany, by contract, the role and value of the fan is different. In my previous article, I mentioned the 50+1 rule, which effectively ensures that fans are placed at the heart of every Bundesliga club (bar a couple that are owned by businesses). In the same way that turkeys wouldn’t vote for Thanksgiving in America, fans who have an ownership stake in their club in Germany are hardly likely to vote for a 300 – 500% ticket price increase to match the prices paid in the Premier League, even if this increase would mean more money for their club.

Another factor to consider here when discussing ticket prices in Europe is to remember that in Germany standing terracing is still used. This is not the case in the UK, and clubs argue (rightly) that providing a seat not only reduces capacity, but is also more expensive in the long-term than simply providing a place to stand.

While there has been some resistance to returning to terracing in the UK, chiefly because of “the Hillsborough effect,” the safe terracing system in use in Germany works well in the Bundesliga, allowing fans cheap access to games and enjoying the game in the way many British Premier League fans would like to.

It is worth noting that outside of the Premier League, terracing still exists and works without a problem. However, it is also worth noting that a fan at Borussia Dortmund pays £7 less to stand and watch their team, than a fan of Exeter City does to stand and watch the Grecians.

The presence of terracing, however, does not explain why Bundesliga fans get such a good deal. The real reason is quite simple and beautifully explained by Bayern Munich’s president who stated with regards to season tickets:

“We could charge more than £104. Let’s say we charged £300. We’d get £2m more in income, but what is £2m to us?”

In a transfer discussions, you might argue about this sum for five minutes, but the difference between £104 and £300 is huge for the fan. Bayern’s president continues:

“We do not think the fans are like cows who you milk. Football has got to be for everybody. That’s the biggest difference between us and England.”

And annoyingly, he’s right.

 

[Tooj 17]

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/aug/13/jurgen-klopp-top-dog-borussia-dortmund-bundesliga

 

Jürgen Klopp will not have to wait long before finding his way into the record books this season: all the 47-year-old has to do is to turn up for Borussia Dortmund's first Bundesliga game against Bayer Leverkusen on 23 August. On that day Klopp will become the longest-serving manager in the history of the Black and Yellows and supersede Ottmar Hitzfeld, who was in charge from 1991 to 1997.

Seven years into his reign at the Signal Iduna Park, the Stuttgart-born heavy metal aficionado has become a legend in his own right; a coach whose transformative effect on his club is rivalled only by that of Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger and José Mourinho in the modern era. Dortmund were labouring under crippling debt in mid-table and turning over €107m, when "Kloppo" took over in 2008-09. One league title (2011), one double (2012) and three runs in the Champions League later, BVB are debt free, well-liked beyond the German borders for their energetic attacking football and benefiting from revenue well north of €300m per season. And in Mats Hummels, Roman Weidenfeller, Kevin Grosskreutz, Erik Durm and Matthias Ginter, they now have five reigning world champions to boot.

Asked whether he would find it difficult to motivate those players after their triumph in Brazil, Klopp joked that the real problem was the other way around. "It's much worse that genuine World Cup winners will be coached by me for the first time," he told reporters at Dortmund's Swiss training camp in Bad Ragaz.

Klopp has cut a very relaxed figure in pre-season, in contrast to his prickly demeanour half-way through the previous campaign. A series of on-air spats with TV journalists and thin-skinned impatience with reporters in press conferences had given rise to the feeling that he was frustrated with Dortmund hitting the glass ceiling well below Bayern Munich, who finished league champions with a couple of months to spare for the second season running. It was a fundamental misreading of the situation.

The manager and the Borussia board still measure success by how far they have come in a short space of time, not how far they still have to go to become the Bavarian giants' true equals. Klopp's nervousness in the winter months was motivated only by the fear of missing out in the Champions League after inconsistent results and a series of injuries. His speech after the unfortunate 2-0 DFB Cup final defeat by Pep Guardiola's side in Berlin in May ("others only celebrate when they win titles, we are different") was a forceful, defiant plea for perspective. "We played a cup final without seven players who were in the starting XI for the Champions League final a year before, and we came second in the league because the team overcame all problems in exemplary fashion," he said. "Why should we question everything now?"

Why indeed? The chances that the relationship between Klopp and the club will be beset by a seven-year itch remain as slim as ever, as long as Dortmund continue on their carefully planned course of sporting and financial consolidation. "We want to establish ourselves further at the top of the league and qualify directly for the Champions League," said the sporting director, Michael Zorc, the quiet co-architect of BVB's renaissance. "Apart from that we want to get to the final of the cup in Berlin again and make it to the knockout round in the Champions League." It's a relatively modest mission statement, even if Klopp has vowed to approach the coming season with "maximum ambition" after two seasons without a meaningful trophy.

Incessant rumours about the possible defection of Klopp and some of his star players, such as Hummels, Marco Reus and Ilkay Gündogan to the Premier League have been met with a mixture of bemusement and irritation in Westphalia. The manager quipped that he would "eat a broomstick" if Hummels, 25, the elegant centre-back, joined Manchester United this season. He is seen as the face of the club and could be the next captain. and stands as a strong candidate for the captaincy after Sebastian Kehl, 34, stepped down from the position. There is less certainty about the future of the winger Marco Reus, 25 – he has a €35m release clause that becomes active in the summer next year – but on and off the record club officials have insisted he will not be sold this month. "Dear lord, please give them brains and some maths tutoring," the Dortmund press officer, Sascha Fligge, wrote on his Facebook page in response to last week's reports in UK newspapers about Dortmund weighing up an offer from Liverpool. (The message has since been deleted).

Borussia's policy since 2011 has been to let only one key player leave each season. In striker Robert Lewandowski they have arguably lost the most important part of the jigsaw, to Bayern. New signings Ciro Immobile (€18.5m, Torino) and Adrian Ramos (€9m, Hertha BSC) have been brought in to fill the void, possibly in a partnership. Klopp is reportedly thinking about a return to the 4-4-2 system he employed in his early days at Dortmund. His bigger concern, though, seems to be the defence as they conceded 38 goals in the league. "We need to concentrate on conceding fewer times next season," he said in Bad Ragaz. Otherwise business as usual is Klopp's promise. "Only stupid people are changed by success," he said in reference to his world champions. "But if a player comes back from the World Cup with a view to doing things differently, I'd listen to him and then probably carry on as before."

[The Fish 10674]

Is the Bundesliga part of the Sky Sports 5 package?

 

Just checked and it's La Liga and the Eredivisie, plus the normal stuff.

 

Shame, I think the Bundesliga isn't too far away from the Premier League and La Liga in terms of strength throughout the league. They need money to swell the smaller clubs' coffers, but they've the demand and the infrastructure.

Edited August 13, 2014 by The Fish

[aimaad22 4086]

An understrength Bayern have been absolutely battered so far in the supercup. What in the world has Guardiola have them trying at the back? Its been a mess.

[The Fish 10674]

An understrength Bayern have been absolutely battered so far in the supercup. What in the world has Guardiola have them trying at the back? Its been a mess.

Lulling them into a false sense of security.

[Tooj 17]

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/sep/22/rb-leipzig-germany-red-bull-fans

 

In theory, RB Leipzig’s players should have acclimatised to being the most widely loathed team in German football: over the past five years the club, owned and run by the Austrian energy drink giant Red Bull, has climbed through the lower leagues to its current position near the top of the second division, and the boos and jeers from opposing fans have got louder and louder.

 

And yet it seems they still weren’t prepared for what happened on Sunday: when Leipzig’s first XI entered Union Berlin’s Alte Försterei stadium at 1:30pm, they were greeted with 15 minutes of silence from the 20,000 spectators, clad almost entirely in black.

 

With permission from Union’s management, fans had handed out black plastic ponchos at the gates, along with a pamphlet headlined, “Football culture is dying in Leipzig – Union is alive”.

 

“Today’s opponent embodies everything that we at Union don’t want from football”, it read. “A marketing product pushed by financial interests […], players with euro signs in their eyes […], supported by brainwashed consumers in the stands who have never heard anything of fan ownership”.

 

A banner inside the stadium stated: “Football needs workers’ participation, loyalty, standing terraces, emotion, financial fair play, tradition, transparency, passion, history, independence.”

 

In sporting terms, at least, the protest worked. Thanks to two goals from Sebastian Polter, Union Berlin won 2-1 – their first win of the season lifting them out of the relegation zone. It was RB Leipzig’s first defeat, dropping them into third place. As the Berlin club’s anthem “Eisern Union”, sung by punk icon Nina Hagen, rang through the stadium, it didn’t seem too absurd to dream that people power might halt the run of big business on German football.

 

On the surface, the two clubs from the former East could not be more different. Union, founded in 1966, is frequently cited as the shining example of what you get when fans have a say in how the club is run. This summer, it invited its supporters to bring sofas into the stadium to watch World Cup matches on a giant screen. In 2009, 1500 fans volunteered to help with renovation works at the home ground in Berlin’s Köpenick district.

RB Leipzig was created by Red Bull in May 2009 and has enjoyed generous funding from the company’s billionaire owner Dietrich Mateschitz ever since: this summer alone, it invested almost €12m in new players.

Unlike Union, the Saxon club is accused of resisting supporter influence, deliberately making fan membership expensive and hard to obtain. A proper membership scheme was introduced only when the German football league threatened not to hand Leipzig a second-division licence this summer. It now has around 300 members. Union have 12,054.

 

Union have not been shy to criticise their Leipzig rivals in the past. When the club were trying to attract investors in 2011, they ran an ad showing a crushed can of Red Bull, with the slogan, “We are selling our soul, but not to anyone”. That same summer, the Berliners set a precedent by cancelling a friendly against Leipzig in response to fan protests – bigger Bundesliga teams such as Stuttgart and Nuremberg have since followed suit.

When Bochum’s coach Peter Neururer recently said that what Red Bull were doing to football “makes me want to throw up”, he seemed to speak on behalf of fans across the country, concerned that the success of the Leipzig model could hollow out the community-minded principles of German club football. “When football is predominantly used as a marketing unit for a brand of product,” Neururer said, “then I can understand the fans’ concerns.”

 

Yet in reality, RB Leipzig’s supporters say, things are not as simple as the contrast with Union suggests. The rise of the Roten Bullen, they argue, needs to be understood within the context of the decline of East German football after the fall of the Berlin wall. While the traditional GDR-era clubs Lokomotive Leipzig and Chemie Leipzig have perished, RB looks like a club with a future.

 

Red Bull’s money has helped build the kind of modern training facilities the region had been missing for years, with the sporting director Ralf Rangnick stating he wants “every young talent in the east to run through our professional academy”. The club already has a track record of selecting young players, such as the Denmark international Yussuf Poulsen (20) and the U19 European champion Joshua Kimmich (19), over seasoned veterans.

 

In the long run, the East German football expert Frank Willmann recently suggested, only Red Bull would have the financial acumen to stop Bayern Munich, the juggernaut of German football, from total domination – Dortmund, Leverkusen and Schalke would beg to differ, of course.

 

In one respect, at least, the pamphlet handed out in front of the Alte Försterei is off the mark. Contrary to what the “plastic club” image suggests, RB Leipzig have a relatively large and loyal support base – last season, it had the highest average attendance in the third division.

 

One supporters group, the Rasenballisten, released a manifesto which doesn’t sound too dissimilar to the one handed out in Berlin on Sunday: “We offer all those a permanent home at RBL who value the positive sides of the club which is currently enjoying most success in Leipzig, but who nonetheless struggle to identify with a product. The Rasenballisten stand for football, Leipzig and fan culture, not for sponsors!”

 

[Tom 14011]

Quite close to home in one manner - Sports Direct United & a million miles away in another - effective fan activism.

 

A good read. Strangely I haven't caught much Bunedsliga this year.

[Meenzer 15347]

Good piece, although some of the language used by the various protesters is so German. Got to admire the general attitude though. I haven't seen as much of the Bundesliga as I'd like this season either, just the odd game here and there, but the top of the table right now is excellent: 1 Paderborn, 2 Mainz, 3 Hoffenheim.

[Tooj 17]

Aye it was a good result for Mainz at the weekend.

 

Keep on saying it but in an ideal world (and he's available) I'd love for Tuchel to be our manager.

 

In reality I can see him at Schalke after his year in exile when Keller is inevitably bombed out.

[Meenzer 15347]

Schalke would be the obvious nearer-term destination for him I think, aye. Other than that it might depend on what noises Löw makes about his future - if he indicates that (contracts aside) he might step aside after the Euros providing Germany win it or come close enough, there'd be an obvious Löw - Klopp - Tuchel chain reaction there, at least assuming Tuchel's happy to stay out of the game for that long. But then that also depends on Klopp wanting to take over the national team at this stage - I could imagine him wanting to tick the box marked "Premier League" first...

[Park Life 71]

Not winning the Euro's would be seen as a disaster.

[Monroe Transfer 0]

So Dortmund's domestic season is going so badly that even we've accrued more points at this stage than they have.

 

Decent result for Monchengladbach at Bayern earlier too.

[Monroe Transfer 0]

Der Klassiker in just over an hour, can't wait. Could do wonders for BVB's season, to state the obvious. A win for them (and Hamilton tomorrow evening) would make for a great weekend of sport. For once.

[Tooj 17]

Superb counter attack.

[Kevin Carr's Gloves 3788]

Paderborn in the BL woohoo.

[Monroe Transfer 0]

Dortmund.

 

[Meenzer 15347]

It's getting a bit ridiculous now. Might even cost Klopp his reputation as the next saviour of Liverpool.

[PaddockLad 16992]

Didn't the premier league twat the bundesliga 4 nowt this week?... sausage suckers are overrated iyam....

[aimaad22 4086]

Lost Lewandowski and Rues has been injured for most of this term. Got to feel for them. Doesnt explain the way they've been defending though.

[Tooj 17]

Lewandowski was so important for them like, he just linked everything together. He's definitely in the top three strikers in the world like.

 

Couldn't get my head round why Klopp went for Immobile as one of his replacements. Not that I don't rate him but he is just a pure poacher, whereas Lewandowski is so much more and was so good at bringing others into play with his back to goal.