On the side, they were butchers, greengrocers, gas station tenants or teachers. When the Bundesliga was founded 60 years ago, the vast majority of professionals continued to pursue a profession.
Compared to today, the very, very small earning potential in football left even stars like Uwe Seeler no other choice. “I couldn’t even have rented a tent for my family in Hamburg for that,” joked the DFB honorary captain, who died in 2022, years ago, with a view to the upper salary limit of 1,200 marks gross set when the league was founded. “It was clear to me from the start of the Bundesliga that I had to keep my job. Just for safety reasons. All my colleagues at HSV did the same,” recalled the vice world champion from 1966.
Annual average between 1.5 and 2 million euros
Even if there was more money for one or the other professional in exceptional cases, such conditions are unthinkable today. Exorbitant salaries, petty cash and transfer fees prompt discussions about football’s dwindling down-to-earthness. Experts now estimate the average annual salary of Bundesliga professionals at between 1.5 and two million euros. Top earners at record champions FC Bayern should even come to around 20 million euros.
Player advisor Stefan Backs considers such sums to be reasonable. “When Hollywood stars earn millions, so can soccer stars. They entertain millions of people around the world. It’s no longer a sweaty sport like it used to be, but a well-clocked part of an entertainment industry. That explains these salary jumps,” he said the German Press Agency.
In the past six years alone, the total personnel costs in the football upper house for professionals and coaches have risen from 1.05 billion euros to 1.46 billion euros. “Everyone who plays in the Bundesliga should – whoever – be grateful every day that they have this talent,” commented the then DFL managing director Christian Seifert at the beginning of 2017. Even the loss of income of the clubs in the corona crisis reduced the wage costs only temporarily and marginally.
Consultants in great demand
So much money on the market arouses covetousness. Every talented regional league player now affords an advisor. According to Backs, however, consultants only contribute to rising personnel costs to a limited extent: “They are accelerators, but not the cause of this system.” He also referred to the significantly lower earning potential in the other two German professional leagues: “If you add the 2nd and 3rd leagues, the average salary drops to well under one million euros.”
Nevertheless, the lavish payments in the football upper house are causing public debates. Demands for a “salary cap” like in the American National Basketball Association (NBA) regularly fall flat. “The NBA is a closed system, but football is not. It depends on individual associations across Europe. If just one association doesn’t participate, everything will be undermined,” commented Backs, referring to the difficulties of implementation. Attempts by UEFA to curb the financial proliferation of the continental clubs through the financial fair play rule are only partially effective.
Even the more puristically thinking founding fathers of the Bundesliga were overwhelmed by the development. Special bonuses, black money payments and the bribery scandal in the early 1970s led to the lifting of the upper salary limit. This should reduce the risk of large-scale manipulation of game results.
First shirt advertisement in 1973
From then on, salaries increased rapidly. New sources of income contributed to further commercialization. The moral indignation at the first shirt advertisement, when the Eintracht Braunschweig players ran out on March 24, 1973 with the deer head emblem of a herbal liqueur manufacturer on the shirt front and thus brought in 160,000 marks for the club, only causes a tired smile today.
Development accelerated enormously with the introduction of the dual broadcasting system in the 1980s. The advantage: The economy discovered the advertising potential of TV sports. In addition, competition for the first exploitation rights developed, since the private broadcasters wanted to establish themselves on the market. The main beneficiaries of this glut of money were the players and their advisors. The Bosman judgment of the European Court of Justice in 1995, which enabled professionals to change clubs free of charge after the end of their contract, usually sweetened with a bonus, increased the earning potential even further.
No German club is yet thinking of a record transfer like the EUR 222 million move by the Brazilian Neymar from Barcelona to Paris in the summer of 2017. But the Bundesliga is also on the way to dizzying heights, for the industry leader Bayern even 100 million euros no longer seems an obstacle.
Nowadays, many protagonists are involved in such negotiations. When Seeler turned down an actually irresistible offer worth millions from Italy at the beginning of the 1960s, things were different. “There were no consultants. I had done some research beforehand and got more and more dizzy every day,” said Seeler, who works part-time as a representative of a sporting goods manufacturer. After days of talks in a Hamburg hotel, he decided to cancel. One reason for this was the father’s simple tip: “He told me that you too can only eat one steak a day.”
