2014 was a long time ago, an eternity for the DFB and the national soccer team.

The world champion from back then has had a sporting crash, and the DFB changes chairmen as often as some clubs change coaches.

When the German men's national team enters the European championship with the game against France on Tuesday evening (9 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for the European Football Championship, on ZDF and on MagentaTV), they can not only rehabilitate themselves athletically.

It can also be recommended as an attractive advertising environment to sponsors who are already publicly complaining.

And it can bring sales to many industries that have suffered from the Corona crisis and for which the DFB brand has been a burden in recent years.

Gustav Theile

Editor in business.

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    Because a good performance by the national team has very practical effects for many companies.

    The classic is beer sales: in June 2014, when the national team was preparing to win the World Cup, beer sales were 14 percent higher than in June 2013. Good tournaments regularly account for a few percentage points in annual sales.

    Restaurateurs hope

    That is why not only the breweries, but also local restaurateurs, who were finally able to reopen their restaurants in these weeks, are counting on a success for the German national team: "We hope that Germany will reach the final," says Ingrid Hartges, General Manager of the Dehoga Gastronomy Association .

    Beer gardens and outdoor restaurants in particular would benefit from this.

    In addition to breweries and gastronomy, football also has an impact on retail: According to a survey by the HDE trade association, every third grocer is currently hoping that sales will increase because of the EM, whether through higher beer sales or grilled food for garden parties. Of course, this requires the appropriate technical equipment: 41 percent of electronics retailers expect higher sales because of the EM.

    Usually, particularly large televisions are also in greater demand. But projectors are also becoming more popular. Football tournaments can even have an impact on the stock market. For world championships, at least, there is this connection, analysts at Goldman Sachs calculated in 2014: If a country wins the World Cup, the stock market development there outperforms the global markets by an average of 3.5 percent in the following month.

    In view of these clear effects on sales, many companies are looking to be close to football as sponsors or with commercials. The cooperation with some corporations was and is almost symbiotic. Ex-Adidas boss Robert Louis-Dreyfus was one of the key figures in the summer fairy tale affair surrounding the 2006 World Cup in Germany, while the national team now even lives on the Adidas premises in Herzogenaurach during the European Championship. Nevertheless, publicly critical voices are currently also coming from the sponsors. "In the end we need a self-contained DFB with a good product - and that is a good national team," said Adidas boss Kasper Rorsted in an interview with the FAZ at the end of May , including Adidas, as sports sponsors, according to:The DFB has lost its role model function and needs help from outside, said S20 boss Stephan Althoff, full-time telecom manager, in an interview with the FAZ.

    Whether the sponsorship plan works out “depends heavily on the success of the sponsored team for sports brands,” says marketing professor Thorsten Hennig-Thurau from the University of Münster. That could even backfire: "When things go really badly, the consumer not only distances himself from the national team, but also from the sponsor."

    The example of Adidas shows how much money is involved. According to Rorsted, the company would be short of 50 to 70 million euros without the European Championships and the Olympics in Tokyo. This becomes clear when looking at the jersey sales: In the odd years between EM and World Cup, around 300,000 DFB jerseys are sold, in Corona year 2020 it was only 50,000. This emerges from an analysis that the sports sponsoring specialist Peter Rohlmann, who heads the PR Marketing agency and works with many associations and clubs, prepared for the FAZ. In tournament years, on the other hand, more than a million jerseys are sold. And in 2014, when Germany became world champions, there were even more than 3 million. Result:Instead of a turnover of around 100 million euros in the other tournament years, the DFB jersey sales brought in around 270 million euros, according to Rohlmann.

    The current tournament is not getting off to a good start either: The audience rating for the opening game was not very convincing.

    In 2016, 15 million people tuned in, this time ARD had just under 10 million viewers.

    The reason for this could also have been that Deutsche Telekom also broadcast the game on Magenta TV and that Turkish-speaking fans tuned into Turkish channels.

    However, as is well known, things can change quickly in football.

    Should the national team convince, the quarrels should quickly fade into the background.

    And in spite of all the criticism: ARD and ZDF were recently satisfied with how heavily the commercials around the EM are booked.

    There are hardly any differences to previous tournaments.