2. Bundesliga Club Hopes To Revolutionize Football

It is a small revolution that is happening at 2. Bundesliga club Fortuna Düsseldorf at the moment. Starting with next season, the German football club wants to offer free tickets to all fans for up to three games. The club, in fact, hopes to expand the program in the future to make all home games free to attend.

Instead of buying tickets, fans can apply for tickets online, where allocations will be drawn. The costs of the tickets are covered by local sponsors. “We call it football for everyone,” Fortuna Düsseldorf chairman Alexander Jobst said to a group of international journalists.

“As you know, the challenges in professional football are becoming bigger and bigger,” Jobst said. “It is becoming more difficult to reach a competitive balance, and we had to evaluate how we would reach our ambitions.”

Fortuna’s ambitions are quite clear. The club located in the capital of Germany’s most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia wants to return to the Bundesliga. But with the financial gap between the top clubs in the Bundesliga and the rest of the field continuously growing, clubs like Fortuna find it increasingly more difficult to reach ambitious goals.

As a result, the club has now come up with an ambitious plan to close the gap, and while this might sound counterintuitive at first, making home games free to attend is part of this plan. Fortuna generates about €7-8 million ($7.7-8.8 million) per season through ticketing in the second division, and that figure would grow significantly should the club reach promotion. Sponsors paying for the tickets would not only have to make up that figure but actually pay on top of that for Fortuna the project to be considered a success.

“This is a pilot phase,” Jobst said. “We are convinced that we are going to acquire additional partners in the future as they will see this as an extraordinary concept. The more partners come on board to support ‘Fortuna for Everyone’, the more free matches we can offer for the future.”

For the pilot project, Fortuna has already signed sponsorship deals with Hewlett Packard Enterprise
HPE
(HPE), Targobank, and Provinzial. The club has also joined the Common Goal initiative that supports charities around the world.

According to the club, those sponsorship deals amount to €45 million ($49.5 million) over the next five years. Not all of that money will go to the first team, however. The club has earmarked 20% of the revenue generated through those sponsorship deals for youth and women’s football, and another 20% will go to improve the club’s infrastructure and the stadium.

“Many traditional football clubs now face the challenge that traditional income pillars are going down,” Jobst said. “We have seen that with TV income, especially in the second division. Ticketing is just about stable, and we are happy with the attendance of 27-28,000 that we had this season. At the same time, we don’t know what will happen with the football business over the next few years, and with this concept, we feel we can reach a fundamental economic base from which we can grow.”

Furthermore, the club is also convinced that it will help the club to generate more money in other sectors. After all, not paying for tickets will leave fans with more money to pay for food and merchandise on matchdays. “We expect higher income from those pillars, with regard to the stadium, food, beverages, and merchandise,” Jobst said.

Whether the concept will work is a different question, however. Jobst stated that Fortuna generates about 15-20% of its revenue through ticket sales. “But we don’t know whether ticketing will be stable,” Jobst said. But by giving sponsors an opportunity to sponsor home games as a full package, Jobs believes that the club can offer something new that will not stabilize sponsorship deals but improve them.

“Sponsors have said: ‘Well, that is such a society-driven approach we’re going to compensate the ticketing income as part of our sponsorship,’” Jobst said. “That gives us the safety and the fundamental strength to say: ‘Well, regardless of whether we have 28,29,30 or maybe in the first division 40,000 spectators in the stadium. We have [the money] we are compensated by our partners, and the more partners we are going to win through this concept, the more we can compensate for ticketing.’”

In other words, Jobst believes that signing sponsors to commitments to essentially pay for the tickets will provide the club with a long-term future to plan with. Or to put it differently, Fortuna, through this concept, believes that they can create a stronger economic base for the future.

The whole deal also fundamentally addresses two deeply rooted issues in football. First, in a time of ever-increasing costs through inflation, Fortuna as a brand has recognized that it has to give back to fans. Secondly, the club recognizes that it is hard to close the gap to the top through traditional means.

At several points, Jobst stressed the importance of 50+1 and the members of the club. That makes it difficult to open the club for outside investors. As a result, opening up the door for sponsors to pay for tickets is an interesting approach to finding new revenue streams and, if successful, could revolutionize football in Germany and abroad.

Manuel Veth is the host of the Bundesliga Gegenpressing Podcast and the Area Manager USA at Transfermarkt. He has also been published in the Guardian, Newsweek, Howler, Pro Soccer USA, and several other outlets. Follow him on Twitter: @ManuelVeth