This time, the star of the match day does not go to football as a sport, but to football as a company. Which, because of the 50 1 rule that is usual here, quickly slips into the subgenre of “football as a business soap”. So: what’s the status in Berlin at Hertha Hollywood, the Babylon BSC? In terms of the table, the capital team is reliably stuck despite four games without defeat. But at the top, in the leadership, where the coal is concerned, it’s entertainingly confusing.
As so often on the Spree, all the trouble is fed by a kind of carnival of cultures. On the one hand, Lars Windhorst, disguised as a serious investor, bets a lot of money on a club headed by Vereinsmeier resp. stand ultras. Of course it doesn’t go well. Last stage of the misunderstanding: Windhorst is said to have offered the Hertha management a further 100 million in order to somehow save his 374 million euro investment. As a kind of restart, for players or loss compensation. Or so.
But Kay Bernstein, the new head of the club from Ultrablock, never claims to have heard of that. Instead, he suggests Windhorst retreat. Which finally turns the circle into a square. Because the entrepreneur also wants to leave, has offered the club his 65 percent share. However, Windhorst demands the original 374 million euros for this. But his shares are no longer worth that much, apart from the fact that Hertha BSC also has significantly less money. Not immediately anyway. And because nothing is likely to change that quickly, Windhorst and Hertha will complain about the chains with which they once happily tied themselves to one another until the last judgment. Keep your eyes open when buying a football club.
The farce of unprofessionalism, vanity, greed and savior mania is of course funny, especially for Union fans and other outsiders. The Hertha dilemma is a side effect of the 50-1 rule. People with money can somehow shop into clubs or their outsourced football departments, but that’s about it. Anyone who is dealing with capable football managers, as in Munich or Freiburg, is lucky. Others, on the other hand, quickly get tangled up in the undergrowth of status and responsibilities, DFB statutes, red lines and rebellious fans.
At TSG Hoffenheim, one of the last experiments with traditional patron football went well years ago. They didn’t even start with Leipzig, only HSV is already flirting with permanent sponsor and pain in the neck Klaus-Michael Kühne. You don’t have to be a fan of the British Investors’ League – but a solid club managed by the King Power Group like Leicester City (or a Chelsea FC with the pre-war Abramowitsch) is presumably much easier on the nerves than windy financiers with startup rhetoric in German club law- Jungle.
