RUBRIK HIER 54 <strong>THINK</strong> <strong>ACT</strong> SEPTEMBER 2011 A sea of yellow: Dortmund fans enjoy world-class football from a team with sound finances.
Photos: Michael Rogosch The business of goals APRIL 30, 2011. It‘s a Saturday afternoon, and 1. FC Köln is playing at home against Bayer Leverkusen, Borussia Dortmund‘s only remaining rival for the Bundesliga championship. At 4:53 Köln scores, handing the title to Dortmund. In Dortmund‘s sold-out stadium forty-five miles away, the crowd explodes with joy: when the whistle goes, Borussia Dortmund are the league champions, and the city of Dortmund is a sea of happiness. Amid the revelry, three men remain surprisingly muted. As the final whistle sounds in their team‘s game against 1. FC Nürnberg, they quietly embrace, patting each other on the shoulder, still intent on the pitch. These are the architects of Borussia‘s success: coach Jürgen Klopp, chief executive Hans-Joachim Watzke, and president Reinhard Rauball. Rauball later says that at this crucial moment, he was thinking back to the winter of 2004-2005, when the club was more than EUR 180 m in debt and he feared for its survival. Dortmund‘s 2011 championship win makes sense only when you look at its last championship in 2002. In those days, the team was a veritable constellation of stars, coached by the plain-talking Matthias Sammer; the club played no-frills football designed to get results. There was just one problem; the players were so expensive that they nearly bankrupted the club. By Constantin Wissmann <strong>ACT</strong>: TURN-AROUND BVB In 2005 Borussia Dortmund was on its last legs, its team was broken, its finances were EUR 180 m in the red. Six years later, after a successful turnaround plan, Borussia Dortmund is the German league champion – proving that money alone doesn‘t score goals, but good management does Today, Borussia has a dream team of young, hungry players, comprised mostly of locals from its own youth squad who kick the ball with more grace and power than almost any side in German history. Their coach drives them with the perfect mix of powerful emotion and shrewd analysis. A few years ago, the club was synonymous with everything that was bad about football: arrogance, commercialism and delusions of grandeur. Today, everyone calls it the Black and Yellow Miracle. Miracle is an overused word in football, but in this case it fits perfectly. Borussia‘s sporting revival is no happy accident; it is the result of a precisely planned restructuring program born from the philosophy that a football club is just like any other medium-sized business. This outlook has been slow to catch on in the Bundesliga. It is ironic that it has worked best for a club regarded as the heartbeat of German football, where calm calculation has, until recently, been low on its list of priorities. At the turn of the century, Borussia was still riding high on its sporting successes. It overtook Bayern München to win the Champions League in 1997, but despite its lessthan-glamorous roots in the Ruhrgebiet, the club wanted to emulate the likes of Real Madrid and AC Milan. So management started taking financial risks. The club was the first in Bundesliga history to float on the stock exchange, netting EUR 143 m, but exorbitant players‘ wages and a stadium expansion soon left it short of capi- <strong>THINK</strong> <strong>ACT</strong> SEPTEMBER 2011 55
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