Bundesliga investor plan rejected after intense fan protests. Hans-Joachim Watzke, the chief executive of Borussia Dortmund, should have been celebrating this week’s success because his team was one victory away from winning the Bundesliga for the first time in ten years.
In his current capacity as supervisory board chairman of the German Football League (DFL), Watzke (63) suffered a personal setback on Wednesday when a proposal to enter the Bundesliga into a multibillion-euro partnership with a private equity investor was denied.
The 36 clubs that comprise the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 have been persuaded to vote in support of a plan for months by Watzke and interim DFL chief executives Axel Hellmann and Oliver Leki. The goal is to get a €2 billion ($2.15 billion) investment from a private equity firm.
The three applicants for the investment were Advent, Blackstone, and CVC. In return, the investor would get 12.5% of the money made by a new DFL subsidiary company called “DFL MediaCo,” which would handle and market the Bundesliga’s television broadcasting rights over a 20-year span.
However, the resolution was only supported by 20 clubs, falling short of the two-thirds majority (24 votes) needed in the secret ballot at the DFL’s extraordinary general meeting on Wednesday in Frankfurt. Cologne, Stuttgart, and St. Pauli were among the eleven against the motion, and five abstained.
Bundesliga investor plan rejected after intense fan protests
Watzke later said in a press conference that “life is simple sometimes.” Democracy is that. We did have a majority, but it wasn’t the majority we desired. So the problem is resolved.
The Bundesliga was seeking investments for what reason?
According to Watzke, Hellmann, Leki, and other supporters of the proposed arrangement, German football needs enormous investment to keep up with its competing European leagues.
The Bundesliga trails behind England’s Premier League, particularly regarding broadcasting rights. The Premier League’s current foreign rights agreement, worth €6.3 billion between 2022 and 2025, surpasses that of Germany’s top division, valued at €170 million annually.
Furthermore, because English clubs are not constrained by the so-called 50+1 rule, which mandates that German clubs must continue to be controlled by a majority of its members, they are more appealing to affluent investors and owners.
The DFL plan therefore called for investment in the league as a whole, with the new money to be invested in digitalization and a new online content platform (40%), stadiums, youth academies, and other club infrastructure (45%), and the rest free to invest in players (15%). This was because clubs were unwilling, and in some cases unable, to open up to major investment on an individual level.
 Why was there so much resistance?
The plans, which were first mentioned in German media in February, were opposed by fans as well as some clubs, including Bundesliga team FC Cologne and second-tier club FC St. Pauli, who expressed concerns about the levels of influence a potential investor would want in exchange for a cash infusion as well as their concerns about how the money would be distributed.
Cologne rejected the notion of “generating money at league level for use at club level” in a statement that stated, “Bundesliga clubs would lose some of their freedom to make decisions by entering into a partnership with a private equity investor over a period of 20 years.”
In an effort to allay concerns about further fragmenting the weekly schedule for television, antisocial kick-off times to suit foreign audiences, or the possibility of competitive games abroad, Watzke, Hellmann, and Leki had repeatedly insisted that an investor’s influence would be strictly limited and that they would have no influence over the competition’s format.
Confidential DFL documents, however, which were released to Sportschau this week, showed that an investor would, in fact, be given a type of veto in “important matters.” The DFL apparently did not respond to requests for more information.
Oke Göttlich, the president of St. Pauli, told the public broadcaster NDR before the vote that his organization would only consider talking to a potential investor “if it were absolutely clear what is to happen with the money, that it wouldn’t just be distributed unfairly as it is now and wouldn’t just further destroy the competition.”
