Men's Soccer (Football) Thread [ARCHIVED] Soccer • Page 358

Yeah I think people slightly overstate how much it affects the watching. It's more the principle, and how long they'll continue without supporters.

 

The no fans bit did definitely detract from the atmosphere, but honestly I just really enjoyed there being actual football.

 

My god Fox’s coverage of Bundesliga with all the weird forced pronunciations and corny videos...not so good. I forgot how rough it was. As for the no fans, it’s obviously the better thing to do but it does make it feel like a practice match at times.

 

Where do I begin? The short answer is they are basically just an advertisement for Red Bull disguised as a football club.

The long answer is more complicated:
Traditionally German football clubs are non-profit organizations where you have club members (which basically everyone can become by signing up to the club and pay the membership fee) that decide everything. Once a year every club holds an annual meeting where the members elect the executive committee of the club.
In the late '90s with the commercialization of the sport some clubs were pushing for being more like companies. So the DFB introduced a model where the professional team of a club could be put into a separate entity, basically a separate company. With that they also introduced the 50+1 rule, that states that every parent club (the original non-profit club) has to hold 50% + 1 share of that company. Thus the club members still have the say about everything regarding the new "company". Some clubs like Bayern and Dortmund created such companies for their pro-teams. For example with Bayern you have the FC Bayern München e.V., thats the original club. And then you have the FC Bayern München AG, thats the company that operates the first team (the Bundesliga team) and also the Allianz Arena. The club FC Bayern München e.V. owns 75% of the shares of the FC Bayern München AG, so they comply with the 50+1 rule.
Now back to Leipzig. Red Bull was eager to take over a German football team to have an advertisement for their company. First they tried their luck with St. Pauli and Düsseldorf, but both were not interested (if you know about St. Pauli it's actually funny they even dared to ask in the first place). So they searched somewhere else and decided that it would be good to put up a club in East Germany. At that time (late 00's) there was no club from the east in the Bundesliga. So they decided a club in Leipzig would be perfect. There was already a big stadium there (the old Zentralstadion, which was historically the biggest stadium in Germany and was completely renovated for the 2006 World Cup), that was not used by any club.
But usually, if you create a new club in Germany you start at the very bottom of the football pyramid. In the case of Leipzig that means 13th tier. So if you want to play Bundesliga that equals to 12 years of steady promotions through the different leagues. That was obviously too stressful for RB so they decided to make a shady deal with 5th-tier club SSV Markranstädt to get their license. So in 2009 RB Leipzig started as a new club with the license of SSV Markranstädt in the 5th tier of the German football pyramid.
And now we have to talk about the name: in Germany you cannot have a company as part of a club name. So Red Bull Leipzig was not possible. So they invented the term RasenBallsport Leipzig which literally translates to lawn ball sports Leipzig. They obviously just needed a name that could be abbreviated to RB Leipzig, even if the full name did not make any sense at all.
So now that they had that new club in the 5th tier they basically steamrolled their way up by just throwing money into the club like noone else. Just for comparison when they were in the 2. Bundesliga they spend more money then all other clubs in the league combined (they still needed two years to get promoted into the Bundesliga ;) ).
Now we come back to the club setup as explained in the beginning. Remember that every club consists of its members. Every village club in the lower leagues has at least like 50 club members. Bayern even has 290000 members. Now guess how many members RB Leipzig has: 17, and all of them are employees of Red Bull (what a coincidence). They have a shady clause that basically says any member application can be turned down without reason (which is something that no other club to my knowledge has). And the member fees are close to 1000€ per year while the average in other clubs is something like 50€.
So on paper they comply with the 50+1 rule but in reality they don't allow any regular person to be involved in the club. The club is basically completely controlled by Red Bull.
Now I know that this setup is not unusual for many other countries but remember that it is something that is very unique in Germany. There is no other club that has circumvented the 50+1 rule in such a way. And it is completely detrimental to everything German football is about.

Some more info: there is an exception in the 50+1 rule that states that if a person or company has substantially funded a club for more than 20 years they can become the major shareholder of the club. This rule was especially introduced because of Bayer Leverkusen and VfL Wolfsburg. Both of those clubs were founded by workers of their respective companies back in 1904 (Leverkusen) and 1945 (Wolfsburg). Historically these were just regular clubs where the parent company didn't have much to do with the club itself. That obviously changed in the 90s with the commercialization of the sport. But because of that long term relationship that exception was introduced. It's also the reason why Bayer Leverkusen could keep their name despite sharing the company name.

I hope this helps a little bit to understand German football culture and why RB Leipzig are an evil to it. If you have some more questions please ask, I know that I probably fucked up with some terms or maybe could not get my point across very well.

 

Hudson-Odoi was arrested last night after apparently raping a woman he invited to his house.

 

Was it rape?? I thought I heard he was just meeting a model he met online??

 

Fucking hell.

Didn't see that coming...

 

Despite being a journalist for the Mail, apparently this guy is very reliable.

 

this was a way more indepth explanation that I"m sure anybody was expecting but thank you. Interesting to read.

 

Wow, that escalated. Read up on it.

 

Responses on Twitter make for grim reading...

 

Yeah fuck. Last I read was she was feeling unwell and that it was rumoured to be drugs related.

Rape though, bloody hell.

 

I just don't get why people feel the need to go in so strongly in the comments. The story hasn't even really been explained at this point, so why people feel the need to state such poorly founded opinions is beyond me.

I mean, it sounds pretty serious. Police and an ambulance showed up over it.

 

It looks pretty bad, at best. Just hopefully not as bad as is currently being reported.

 

This is cool.

 

This is a fantastic description; a detailed but simple look at German football culture, thank you.

 

https://sports.theonion.com/german-...tm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_source=facebook

 

"Manchester United are suing the makers of the Football Manager series for allegedly infringing their trademark by using the club's name "extensively throughout the game" {...} The club also argue Sega and SI have infringed their trademark over their logo by not using the official Manchester United crest in the game, instead "replacing the club crest with a simplified red and white striped logo"



So they are complaining that FM shouldn't be using the club's real name but also that they should be using the real crest???

 

Dortmund - Bayern starts in 40 minutes.

 

Obviously anything can happen in these matches, but that Bayern lineup looks quite strong. I'd say this is Bayern's to lose, tbh. Not too optimistic with Dahoud starting. Sure to be some silly giveaways, unfortunately. Looking forward to it, nonetheless!

 

Dortmund not having a fully fit Witsel, Can, Reus, and Sancho for this kinda sucks.

 

Great goal from Kimmich.

 

Perfect tackling from Phonzie, how is that a yellow?

 

Good game to Bayern. I'm mostly annoyed that Fox decided to broadcast crowd noise. We had all sorts of issues today, not least of which the fact being that Bayern is just the better side. I hope the season is still salvageable in terms of securing second...

 

IDK what to feel tbh...