THINK ACT

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
ACT: 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-
THINK ACT SEPTEMBER 2011 55