10 Reasons Why German Football is Succeeding

One of these German clubs will win the Champions League. (Photo: independent.co.uk)

Smart national and team operations key the reasons

By  Michael Ligot, Bundesliga Columnist

Like many fans of a certain age, one of my first soccer experiences was “Soccer Made in Germany” on PBS. Every week Toby Charles narrated an edited one-hour broadcast of a Bundesliga game. When I could wrestle the TV away from my “SuperFriends”-loving siblings, I would watch teams like 1. FC Kaiserslautern, Borussia Dortmund, FC Schalke 04, Bayern Munich (“Bayern München?”) and others in the league with the exotic name. (I also learned about German manufacturing innovations and the history of lederhosen in the five-minute halftime news features, but that’s another story.)

Sadly, “Soccer Made in Germany” disappeared into the public television ether in my late teens.

Then as an adult I found regional sports channels and Fox Sports World, and with it the onslaught of the English, Spanish and Italian leagues. My access to the Bundesliga fell by the wayside, not to come back until I learned German, could read kicker.de in the original language, and finally got GOL TV, which — yee-haw! — carried the Bundesliga!

For non-American soccer, I concentrated on Germany to the virtual exclusion of the other leagues. And now, to celebrate the modern Bundesliga’s 50th. anniversary, I’m excited that a German team, either Dortmund or Bayern, will win the Champions League title Saturday.

The rest of the world has noticed. European newspapers and American fansites alike have wondered how German teams suddenly climbed to the top of the hill.

So when the editor of Prost — which started life as a bilingual English-German Seattle weekly paper, by the way — asked me to take a look, I didn’t hesitate. I’m not a trendy hipster who wants to keep the next hot thing to himself, I’m glad to pass along what I know. (Besides, I’m not wearing my jeans with holes right now, and this is being written at home on a laptop, not at a coffee shop on a tablet.)

Here are ten factors I have to explain German domestic soccer’s current prominence.

A “Nationallmannschaft” rennaissance benefitted the Bundesliga. (Photo: dfb.de)

1) Revamping of the German development process. To get to the top, you have to hit bottom. That happened in In Euro 2000, when Germany finished bottom of its group with but one point, against Romania. (ROMANIA?!)

That week of reckoning brought the Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB, the national association) to retool its nurturing of youth players to the clubs and national team.

Result:  current streaks of three straight World Cup semifinals and two straight Euro semifinals for Germany, including final appearances in 2002 (WC) and 2008 (Euro). That nurturing of talent only helped the home league, especially as the Bundesliga has not been as reliant on foreign talent as, say, England and Spain’s leagues have been.

2) The national economy. Save perhaps the United Kingdom, Germany’s the only large European country in good financial shape. That means fans can afford to buy tickets and TV networks and advertisers can pay big bucks, which allows the potential for team profitability and cash for player signings.

3) “50+1” Rule. In ownership matters, the DFB went with Karl Marx over Daddy Warbucks. The DFB instituted a rule that limits an individual and/or corporate investor to only 49 percent ownership of a team.* The rest? Power to the people; it goes to the individual club members.

This prevents an Abramovich- or Glazer-like takeover of a given team and loading up on superstars to pulverize the opposition. With the lack of a North American-style salary cap, which I understand may be illegal in the European Union, this is the best way to help level the economic playing field between teams, and may have been the blueprint for FIFA’s forthcoming Financial Fair Play standard.

*Exceptions have been granted to longstanding company-owned teams Wolfsburg (Volkswagen) and Leverkusen (Bayer), but that hasn’t resulted in a rush of trophies to either. If a company was allowed to buy Bayern Munich, however, that would have been deadly to competition.

4) Competitive Balance. Although Bayern unquestionably reigns as the historic king of the Bundesliga’s hill, they don’t have a Barcelona- or Milan-like claim on the league’s championship. Munich’s title this year was its first since 2010, interrupting a brace from Dortmund.

Stuttgart cashed in six years ago, relentlessly uneven Bremen did the league/DFB “Pokal” (cup) double in 2004, and Wolfsburg came from ninth place to win “the world’s ugliest salad plate” in 2009. Five different winners in a decade; that’s probably as wide-open a title chase as you can get in European soccer. A mid-’90s Blackburn Rovers does have a chance here.

5) Innovative strategies. Just like how Jürgen Klinsmann and Joachim Löw led the German national team away from the traditional fast-and-furious style, German teams have adopted rather sophisticated strategic methods to flummox European opponents.

In 2010, Dutchman Louis van Gaal won Bayern the 2010 title and reached the CL final with a Dutch-style passing game. Dortmund’s all-out pressure attack that destroyed Real Madrid mirrors their excitable coach Jürgen Klopp. Heck, Freiburg’s Christian Streich instituted preplanned off-the-ball route running, similar to patterns football receivers use, and that brought the small-town team to within a whisker of the Champions League this season.

6)  Judicious sales/payments of players. With smart financial planning comes smart salaries. Look at two of the highest-spending teams, who are in the CL final. Bayern paid only $210 million** and Dortmund $102 million on their players, a bargain in Europe. And they make sweet profits on player sales, such as when Bremen bought Mezut Özil from Schalke for $5.5 million and flipped him to Real Madrid for a reported $19 million.

** For simplicity, all figures are converted to US dollars at press-time rates.

Cheap ducats and huge binoculars let many Dortmunders see games. (Photo: Sport360.com)

7) Fan-friendly policies and ticket pricing.  Unlike in England, the DFB, fans and police have figured out a way to solve the issue of standing. Thus, fans of virtually every team have a dedicated standing terrace for tickets as low as $15, and with very rare exceptions they don’t abuse that trust with hooliganism or projectile-throwing.

Hence, some of the loudest atmospheres in Europe, such as with Dortmund’s “Yellow Wall”. Oh, and full houses to boot:  most teams averaged 90 percent capacity last season, with laggard Stuttgart’s 83 percent still respectable.

8) League structure. With only 18 teams and the one Pokal, Bundesliga players don’t get worn out like with the 20-team Western European leagues. That keeps them fresher for continental championships and doesn’t wreck team depth. It also prevents an Arsenal-like use of the Pokal as a reserve run-out, which is a breath of fresh air.

9) Clever outsourcing. One reason for the hot rise is the sourcing of talent in different, cheap places where soccer is burgeoning. Germany circa the 1980s was one of the first countries to tap into South America, especially Brazil, in an era when European teams didn’t look much beyond their borders.

It even led the way into importing Americans, with Paul Caligiuri, Eric Wynalda and Steve Cherundolo prime examples. The new hot area? East Asia, specifically Japan and South Korea. That has paid dividends, both on the field and off:  Dortmund bought Shinji Kagawa from Cerezo Osaka for $452,000, and after winning two straight titles with Kagawa a key cog, sold him to Manchester United for $21 million.

10) Good marketing — finally. After watching the EPL, La Liga and the rest hog the worldwide spotlight, German teams are finally getting back to reaching out to the world. The Bundesliga website now had editions in English, Polish and Japanese, and top games reach TV audiences in virtually every country in the world. In the United States, GOL TV does a good job with coverage and ESPN3 carries games online, but they don’t penetrate many households. With the upcoming soccer channel shuffle, however, that could change very soon.

At the very least, Americans will get to see what the Bundesliga’s all about Saturday. Toby Charles, wherever he is, would be proud.

Michael Ligot’s Match Preview: Six-Shooting the UCL Final: Westphalia or Bavaria?

Hubert’s Hub: German Sides have Added Flair to Pragmatism