50+1 and investor search: "That pisses me off"

At some point Fernando Carro got angry.

"It pisses me off," said the managing director of Bayer Leverkusen at the SPOBIS sports business congress, which is taking place this week in Düsseldorf, when the question was raised in a discussion with his colleagues Carsten Cramer (Borussia Dortmund) and Oliver Mintzlaff (RB Leipzig). the correct attitude of German football towards investors.

As is well known, the German Football League (DFL) is currently working on selling around a quarter of the shares in the media rights to international marketing to an investor, but Carro wants more: the Spaniard, who was on the Bertelsmann AG board for a long time, hopes that the The 50+1 rule is overturned and the accusation was made that the industry had developed a "taboo" here.

If the clubs are willing to sell parts of the international marketing rights to an investor, "then let's discuss 50+1 openly," he exclaimed.

The refusal of such a discussion is "populist".

Journalists from the “far left”

That was strange, because the rule has existed for more than 20 years, and since then arguments have been exchanged in waves, in public, among fans, officials and within the DFL, where votes have already been taken to keep the rule.

At some point, Mintzlaff tried to calm his angry colleague, "everything is recorded here," said the RB official, but Carro couldn't be stopped.

Also "the journalists, many of them only on the far left, left-oriented", who refuse this debate, are responsible for the standstill.

This more emotional than factual interlude was a massive contrast to the appearance of Donata Hopfen, who had previously weighed every word of her 30-minute talk with maximum caution, knowing full well how emotionally people sometimes react to the investor topic.

The 50+1 rule, which prevents financiers from taking over voting majorities in clubs, is currently only of secondary importance.

The DFL is negotiating with eight companies that can envisage acquiring shares in the international marketing rights for the entire league, which is possible without new rules.

Specifically, seven private equity companies and the cable network operator Liberty Media are said to have expressed an interest.

Deutsche Bank has been commissioned to mediate at the interface between these potential investors and the DFL.

"Fourth step before the first"

However, Hopfen, who would like to share details with the clubs in regional conferences in the near future, only said: “To be honest, what you are currently reading in the media is the fourth step before the first.

We have set up a working group in which we evaluate options. ”This has been known for a long time, but obviously the official who took over the position from Christian Seifert at the head of the league association on January 1st has become extremely careful in her communication.

In her first few months, she made mistakes, which culminated in the fact that she explicitly did not rule out awarding the Supercup game to Saudi Arabia.

At the Düsseldorf Congress, she now had to find her way in a particularly difficult environment on the main stage of Europe's largest sports business congress.

Before her, it was her predecessor Seifert's turn, who presented his playback platform "Dyn", based at Springer-Verlag, on which high-class sports such as the handball Bundesliga can be streamed from next summer.

His successor works under significantly more difficult conditions, said Seifert, because "the number of media companies willing to accept losses in the hundreds of millions to get into a sports market is decreasing".

“It doesn’t work without investments”

After hops, Deutsche Bank boss Christian Sewing entered the podium, who spoke so openly about his involvement in the DFL investor project that some observers wondered why the DFL managing director was keeping such a low profile.

"We are already advising the league in terms of finding investors, we are in the interim position and know the market.

For example, there are other leagues where Deutsche Bank has helped," said Sewing, who is certain that the 36 clubs in the first and second leagues will soon be presented with a suitable partner: "It doesn't work without growth and investments, and Investing always means I need capital.”

Finally, Carro, Mintzlaff and Cramer then discussed how to increase revenue from international marketing because the league is relatively unsuccessful at this point.

Cramer called for more trips from clubs to arouse interest in Asia or South America, and Mintzlaff suggested that those who do not get involved through such activities “they then participate significantly less or not at all” in the income from foreign business will.

In any case, it will be interesting to see whether the clubs actually wave the proposals through as enthusiastically as the supporters of the investor project claim.

Because the question of which of the 36 shareholders of the German Football League think such a deal is good at all has actually never been discussed in detail, in contrast to the positions in the 50+1 question.