There is nothing like habits. Year after year in May there is the same discussion about German volleyball: It is the question of whether the eternal duel between the Berlin Recycling Volleys and the VfB Friedrichshafen has a negative impact on the league.
The two clubs compete for the seventh time in a row in the championship final. In 2012, Haching was the last time another team participated in the final. In the chronicle of the title holder you have to go back to 1997, to bump with the ASV Dachau to another club that could win the coveted trophy.
Therefore, the encounters are boring, on the contrary. Since Sunday, VfB are in the lead in the series Best-of-Five 2: 1 and could take the title of the BR Volleys after three years on Wednesday (18.30, TV: Sport1). If the Berlin remain true to their home strength, the finals series goes into the fifth round.
"Nobody can predict how this playoff series will end, which makes them so attractive," says Michael Warm, 2005-2009 coach of the Berlin. For the upcoming season, Warm takes over as coach at VfB. Both clubs have done many things right for decades, acting independently of coaches and leading players both athletically and financially at the top. They are the equivalent to Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund. This duel is not the problem of the league, but it lacks currently other attractive options: an exciting fight against relegation and the European starting places.
Fear of financial collapse
Düren last refrained from participating in the Challenge Cup as well as Wiesbaden with the women. The MTV Stuttgart wanted to change its Champions League place with the Dresdner SC, so great was the fear of a financial setback - that has a reason: 100,000 to 150,000 euros each club must raise in the group stage of the premier class to the fees (alone 25,000 euros only for the participation) plus travel expenses and the TV pictures as well as the video proof system for each home game to finance.
In the end Stuttgart won as a quarter-finalist even the highest premium of the five German teams in the Champions League. However, the 57,500 euros were just enough to refinance half of the expenditures, even though the European Union raised the total premium to 3.5 million euros, almost doubling it. "It is absurd that you have to pay for the performance that you do physically, economically," says Warm, who made it in 2017 with the United Volleys to the semifinals of the European Cup and still made a loss.
He sees the increase in the total premium as a step in the right direction, but in marketing there is still a lot of room for improvement. "We have to better position the sport in Germany, including big events," says Volleys BR manager Kaweh Niroomand. Also for this reason, he has brought the Champions League finals of women and men for May 18 to Berlin: "This can give the sport a boost and arouse more interest in sponsors."
Alpenvolleys Haching on the upswing
Also in the league a lot is happening. Had the Alpenvolleys Haching won only two more sets in the last games of the main round, the pairings would have been different in the subsequent playoffs - and Berlin and Friedrichshafen would have met instead in the final in the playoff semi-final. "The league has been more balanced this season than it has been in a long while," says Warm.
With Frankfurt, Düren, Lüneburg and the Alpenvolleys, which received a wild card in 2018 as a merger of a German and an Austrian club, some clubs have developed in the upper third of the table. "We have to really accelerate if we want to keep up," says Warm with regard to his new job at VfB.
Thanks to the up-and-coming Eltmann, the men's league will be full again for the first time since 2010 with twelve teams in the coming season. In addition, Giesen has held the league as promoted and presented a financially sound concept. "I see a positive development," says Ligageschäftsführer Klaus-Peter Jung. "Our measures to bring clubs on the rise in the long term are now bearing fruit."
The men have copied a lot from the women, whose league has been more balanced for years and in the past eleven years, with two exceptions always full. In the final series MTV Stuttgart against SSC Palmberg Schwerin it is also 2: 1, the Stuttgart are like VfB an away win away from the championship (Thursday, 18.30 clock, TV: Sport1).
The women also act with the same budget and the same number of viewers as the men. This is a special feature compared to other sports. In TV ratings, the women are even ahead. Nevertheless, there is every year again the discussion about Friedrichshafen against Berlin. Maybe that's just part of the tradition.