German football, the Bundesliga and the road to EURO 2024
January 19, 2023
In the week after Germany's second consecutive World Cup group stage exit, and with the tournament still ongoing in Qatar, things moved quickly in German football's corridors of power.
On Thursday, December 1, Germany's fate had been sealed despite a 4-2 win over Costa Rica. By the following Monday, key personnel decisions at both the German Football Association (DFB), which operates the national team, and the German Football League (DFL), which runs the Bundesliga, had already been made.
Head coach Hansi Flick kept his job, but DFB national team director Oliver Bierhoff fell on his sword after overseeing three consecutive early exits from major tournaments and failing to implement much-needed reforms. He has since been replaced by former Germany striker and Bayer Leverkusen sporting director Rudi Völler.
Meanwhile at the DFL, Kicker magazine was already reporting that chief executive Donata Hopfen, only in the job since January 2022 and the first woman to hold the position, was set to follow suit, which she did at a meeting of the organization’s supervisory board on the Wednesday.
Referring to a "week of the long knives," popular football magazine 11Freunde commented, "It's as if German football has, in a brief moment of clarity, recognized the deep crisis into which it has maneuvered itself through its complacency and inertia."
Hans-Joachim Watzke pulling the strings
Both Bierhoff and Hopfen had been under threat at their respective organizations since before the World Cup, but one man was influential in executing both dismissals: Hans-Joachim Watzke.
Best known as the chief executive of Borussia Dortmund since 2005, the 63-year-old has also chaired the DFL's supervisory board since December 2021, a position which also makes him DFB vice-president by default and now, with Bayern Munich's relatively new management structure still finding its feet under Oliver Kahn, arguably the most powerful figure in German football.
New DFB president Bernd Neuendorf has only been in the top job since March 2022 and his authority took a hit at the World Cup over the "One Love" armband affair. While his first 12 months have been a baptism of fire, there are more challenges to come in 2023, including plugging a €30.1m hole in the DFB's finances and identifying Bierhoff's successor, revealed on Thursday evening to be Völler.
He was assisted in the latter endeavor by a working group consisting of several prominent figures in German football, including Watzke, which will continue to advise him on national team matters. Women and ethnic minorities are conspicuous by their absence, with Neuendorf insisting: "Diversity wasn't our primary criterium here […] We need people with experience, who have played for the men's national team, who have worked for the DFB and who have a wealth of experience and contacts in professional football."
Helen Breit, however, of nationwide fan coalition Unsere Kurve, told DPA: "It's absurd that it's always the same [men] talking about the same topics but that we expect a different result […] This would have been the ideal moment to show that the DFB has understood that it has to stop going in circles. But I can't see how this constellation is going to bring about refreshing, sustainable, grassroots, structural change."
The rise and fall of Donata Hopfen
While the DFB wrestles with internal structural issues and attempts to reconnect with a disillusioned supporter base, the DFL finds itself at a crossroads of its own following the resignation of Hopfen less than a year after the departure of long-serving CEO Christian Seifert.
Seifert was credited with significantly boosting the Bundesliga's international presence and lauded for guiding the league through the COVID-19 pandemic – which at one point reportedly posed an existential financial threat to 13 of the 36 clubs in Germany's top two divisions.
They were big boots to fill but Hopfen, formerly head of digital at tabloid newspaper BILD, immediately set alarm bells ringing when in her first major interview she floated the idea of staging the German Super Cup in Saudi Arabia and claimed that there would be "no sacred cows" regarding the future of the 50+1 rule – of which Dortmund boss Watzke remains an advocate.
Speaking to journalists in December, Watzke admitted that significant differences of opinion had emerged between himself and Hopfen before announcing that Eintracht Frankfurt board member Axel Hellmann and SC Freiburg financial director Oliver Leki will head up the DFL on an interim basis until the end of the season.
The Bundesliga at a crossroads
As the Bundesliga resumes this weekend, it faces several significant challenges, not least of all the fact that the two-month World Cup and winter break lay-off has seen the league surrender global attention to rival leagues.
On the pitch, a win for Bayern Munich away at RB Leipzig in the 2023 opener on Friday night would see the Bavarians open up a nine-point lead over the controversial Red Bull outfit, currently sat in third place. Off it, stadiums will be full and Germany's vibrant fan culture will be on display as usual, but the prospect of an 11th straight Bayern title will raise questions over competition and the inevitable debate over investors and the 50+1 rule.
In July 2021, the German government’s federal competition regulator (the Bundeskartellamt) concluded that the regulation which prevents majority takeovers of German clubs was "unproblematic" – but did raise concerns over exemptions from the rule which apply to Bayer Leverkusen, VfL Wolfsburg, TSG Hoffenheim and – albeit not on paper – the aforementioned RB Leipzig.
Ahead of the Bundesliga restart, interim DFL CEOs Hellmann and Leki expressed confidence that a solution could be found in the first quarter of 2023 – one observers expect to be closer to a retention of the status quo than an outright abolition of the rule.
With a strengthened 50+1 rule continuing to prevent majority takeovers of individual clubs, the DFL is instead investigating the idea of investment in the league as a whole, potentially in exchange for TV broadcast rights. "We have to continue to strengthen our product," said Hellmann. "We're feeling the pressure in many markets, not just on the transfer market but in the broadcast rights market, too."
German football is in flux and there will be more decisions to come as the countdown to EURO 2024 on home soil begins, most likely involving Hans-Joachim Watzke. Until then, focus now turns back to the one thing which hasn't happened in Germany for two months: domestic Bundesliga football.
Edited by James Thorogood