It’s not just Germany’s economy that is going through a slump: German football is stuck in the middle of a veritable crisis, and the chancellor’s recent comments on football woes reveal much of what is holding back Germany at large.
Germany’s national football league, long a powerful force in European football, has slowly fallen behind. Global audiences prefer its glamorous siblings in England and Spain. So do the star players.
Who could blame them? German teams tend to play second fiddle in European club competitions. At home, the 11-year winning streak of national hegemons Bayern Munich has killed all suspense.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz is not known for being particularly opinionated on, let alone fond of, football. He prefers running and rowing ever since his wife told him to start exercising, as he likes to recount – a habit to which he owed a prominent eyepatch following a painful fall during a run.
Nevertheless, Scholz dutifully paid a visit to a gala celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Bundesliga last Wednesday (13 September) and took the opportunity to leave a piece of advice for the top brass of German football as he praised their financial conservatism.
“Maybe it’s not true that the Bundesliga is at a tipping point as [some say],” Scholz said.
Those “who work hard on the pitch and in dealing with their finances” were worthy of victory, the chancellor declared, warning to “think twice about ‘economic stepovers”.
Such finger-wagging puritanism has a long tradition in Germany and is grounded in scepticism towards risk and new impulses. The country operates in a ‘this has always worked’ mode where deviation from old ways is frowned upon and even seen as a moral vice.
This has been reflected, most prominently, by Germany’s year-long fetish around sound finances and avoiding debt, which Finance Minister Christian Lindner likes to lecture its neighbours on.
But it goes further than that: Shepherded by the government, German carmakers only started dipping their toes into the EV business when left no choice.
Digitalisation, let alone creating a digital economy, is still treated as an orphan. Entrepreneurs with daring ideas face a shortage of risk capital because the conservative German investment establishment prefers savings accounts over start-ups.
In German football, this inertia shows in a similar aversion to investment and commercialisation, echoed by Scholz’s comments.
The Bundesliga is proud of its “50+1 rule”, which keeps investors from acquiring a majority stake in German teams. Most recently, several teams foiled plans to sell a stake in their media rights business. Executives, fans, and the press look disapprovingly at the ‘oil millions’ that ‘sheikhs’ are pouring into squads in Britain and France.
But in football, where results show immediately on the pitch, inertia has already come at the price of success. Outspent by their jacked-up international rivals, German teams only produced a meagre four appearances in the finals of the big European club competitions over the last decade – fewer than the much-touted, debt-laden Italian teams.
Off the pitch, Germany’s inertia might also soon catch up with it.
Government officials rightly point out that the current slump is owed to external factors such as Russia’s war. But the German economy, relying mostly on industrial conglomerates and small manufacturers founded in the last century, will continue to fall behind regardless if it does not invest in new business ideas fit for a green, digital AI age.
On the bright side, Germany is good at cleaning up the messes it sleepwalks into. Think Gerhard Schröder’s labour market reforms that laid the groundwork for a decade of prosperity. The last rock-bottom moment in German football in the early noughties was followed by a new golden generation of players and a World Cup victory.
This time, Scholz’s government is betting on pumping money into the green transition and slashing red tape. Lindner is hopeful about tackling the lack of funding for entrepreneurs with a law he dubbed the “Future Financing Act”, due to be debated in parliament on Thursday (21 September).
In any case, the government – just like the country’s football executives – should not be afraid to climb down from its high horse. Because a climb down is still better than the alternative of relegation.
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Look out for…
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Views are the author’s
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Alice Taylor]
Source: euractiv.com
