‘In any decision we take, we ask what is important for the fan and what does the fan expect’ Premium

Bundesliga's '50+1' rule puts fans at the center, guiding clubs like Borussia Monchengladbach towards global expansion.

A fan’s love for the club is the Holy Grail of German football. This resonates in the philosophy of public participation, which serves as the guiding factor for the country’s top football league, the Bundesliga.

Unlike the sweeping corporatization of football across Europe and beyond, the Bundesliga presents a contrasting picture with its ‘50+1’ ownership rule. (The rule refers to the need for members of a club to hold 50 percent, plus one more vote, of voting rights - i.e. a majority)

“We put the fans at the centre. In any decision we take, we ask what is important for the fan and what does the fan expect from the club. We are a club that wants to be very familiar. Our training sessions are public,” insists Markus Aretz (in pic), Borussia Monchengladbach’s managing director. This in essence is the guiding principle of the Bundesliga which the clubs are putting in practice.

“That’s a philosophy which is very important for us. When a new coach comes to our club, we always tell him one thing you have to learn, training is public. Maybe there’s one per week that’s not public because coaches always want to do something secretly, but the rest of the training sessions are public,” insists Aretz. “So there’s always our members and fans watching the training. We always have families that come and spend two, three or four days here at Borussia Park, stay at our hotel, go to the training, go to the restaurant, go to the fan shop, and make a stadium tour. That’s very important for us.”

Aretz is very clear about how the club wants its more than 100 thousand members to be involved. The 50+1 rule, which was implemented in 1998, has prompted the German clubs to put the members at the centre while formulating different business models to finance their strategies.

“It is about football culture. It is even approved by the likes of ESPN and Sky, who say what you bring over or what you distribute is by far the biggest and the best football culture in the world,” said Peer Naubert, Bundesliga’s international chief marketing officer. “Because we have the highest number of average stadium spectators per game, we are obviously by far the loudest, by far the most colourful league. And then we also have the 50+1 rule, making the club here very, very unique compared to the other leagues,” he added while pointing out how individuals or corporate investors are trying to overlook the fans’ interest in trying to maximize profit.

“The most important pillar of the club is sporting success, but what is also very important for us is that we work with economic efficiency. We only spend the money that we earned before. We don’t take any risks. That’s a very old strategy, goes back to the 1960s and 70s when the club became famous and that is how we run the board nowadays,” Aretz elaborates on how his club implements the rule.