1) In many stadiums there are possibilities to buy very cheap tickets, which may not cover real costs. In Dortmund for example pupils up to 16 or 17 (don’t know exactly) pay less than 10 EUR for a stance at the famous tribune “Südtribüne” or families get tickets for a good price in the North-West-corner. I think this is meant by ‘subsidised’ in the article.

2) You have to distinguish the legal entities.

Most German soccer clubs are a club in full fan ownership only. Every member pays an annual membership fee and has exactly one ‘share’, which is nothing than a legal right to vote at the (mostly annual) general meeting. Members of the club often have the possibility to get tickets earlier, get discounts in merchandising stores and so on.

Some clubs, naming Borussia Dortmund or FC Bayern Munich for example, founded new legal entities. They created a new corporation (Borussia Dortmund KGaA, FC Bayern München AG). The ‘old’ legal entity – the club itseld (BV Borussia Dortmund 1909 e.V., FC Bayern München e.V.) remains the full owner of the corporation in the first step and then sells shares of the corporation. So the amount of fans, who are members of the club is not important to amount of shares, the club has.

FC Bayern Munich sold shares to long term partners. The ‘e.V.’ owns 87,4 % of the ‘AG’, sports supplier adidas AG (9,7 %) and main sponsor AUDI AG (2,9 %) bought the other shares. The 50+1 rule regulates, that the club (‘e.V.’) is allowed to sell 49 % of the corporation and not more.

Borussia Dortmund choose an IPO at German exchange Deutsche Börse for its corporation. This was the only IPO of a soccer club in Germany up to now. A KGaA is a special German legal entity. It’s a limited partnership, the general partner in this case should be the ‘e.V.’, the limited partners are the share holders. The BV Borussia Dortmund 1909 e.V. does own less the 10 % of the shares, given to limited partners, but accoording to the articles of association of the ‘KGaG’, the ‘e.V.’ (as a general partner) does have the majority of the votes at the ‘annual stockholders meeting’. The votes are in fact critical to the 50 +1 rule. Hard to explain…

Bayer Leverkusen GmbH (GmbH is similar to a Ltd.) is a special case. It was founded by Bayer AG over hundred years ago and is a fully owned subsidiary of Bayer AG.

Hope this helps a little…

terry, i wonder if you could answer 2 questions i had:

1. you mentioned ‘subsidised attendance costs’, what do you mean by this?

2. in the 50+1 model, is it the case that the member ownership must lead the way in terms of dictating how much can be invested by other parties? i.e. let’s say a club was offered £10m by an investor, it is my understanding that the club could only accept as much as would take them up to 49.9%. in this case – and should an investor such as this come about – would the club push for increased member subscriptions or ask members to up their annual fee? how does it work? similarly, what happens if membership levels drop? are investors forced to take back some of their money? please can you shed some light on how it all works in this respect?

thanks a lot, great article.