FREIBURG, Germany (AP) ― From a corner office of Freiburg’s homely stadium, club chairman Fritz Keller gazes over one of the loveliest views in football. Autumn’s reds, browns and golds streak the surrounding Black Forest. Buzzards wheel in the air above.
But from a football business perspective, this beauty is sterile desert. Black Forest boars make for fine stews, but they don’t buy tickets to games. Thick woods aren’t good places to find young players who could become football’s next superstars. Nature lovers will adore the woodland city’s tinkling waterways where herons fish. But in the increasingly expensive business of football, it is far easier to bag sponsors and revenue in thickly populated urban and industrial areas like Dortmund and Munich.
No accident, therefore, that those cities are home to Germany’s biggest teams. Freiburg plays in the same Bundesliga as those giants. But because it is landlocked in southwest Germany, hemmed in by the Black Forest to the east, France to the west and Switzerland to the south, the club isn’t in the same league financially and never will be. Freiburg executives accept that fact but also worry that no matter how hard they try, the gap between the haves and have-nots of football seems only to grow.
“This is the end of the world,” Keller said of his spectacular vista, “but it’s a nice end.”
On match day, the overpowering smell of grilling sausages seeps into every corner of Freiburg’s Black Forest Stadium. Its capacity of 24,000 is the second-smallest of the Bundesliga. The stadium is so cramped that the pitch is some three body-lengths shorter than it should be. But for less than the cost of watching Arsenal or Manchester United in England’s Premier League, a Freiburg fan can take his or her kid to a game and buy drinks and hotdogs for them both.
The likes of Beyonce and Jay Z go to Paris Saint-Germain, transformed by Qatari petrodollars into football’s new place to see and be seen. In Gareth Bale, Real Madrid boasts football’s first 100 million-euro player. But Freiburg offers football on a human scale.
Club executives speak proudly of how Freiburg lives within its modest means, spends only what it earns, trains young players instead of buying them, hasn’t accrued monster debts like so many other clubs in Europe’s top leagues and isn’t dependent on rich investors’ whims.
“A football club is not a toy,” Keller, the chairman, said in an Associated Press interview. “A football club is a community of a lot of great people.”
Despite losing last weekend to Wolfsburg, Freiburg’s players still mingled with their adoring public after the match, signing shirts and posing for selfies with wide-eyed girls who’d written “Freiburg” and “Forward!” in black on their young faces. The stadium bubbled with fervor and the pounding of drums. A fan with a bullhorn led chanting in heaving stands awash with giant flags.
The 2-1 loss made it eight games in a row that Freiburg has failed to win this season. Playing in red, the team was comprehensively out-witted. Wolfsburg, the Bundesliga champion in 2009, fielded expensive stars Kevin De Bruyne, a speedy Belgium international, and Luiz Gustavo, a Brazilian. Both its goals came from a former Freiburg player, Daniel Caligiuri. Double-ouch.
Still, Freiburg fans remained good-humored and philosophical, lingering at the stadium to share beers, cigarettes and chat while their kids played and kicked balls.
“You must be able to suffer sometimes, to take pain,” said Burkhard Poschadel, a ticket holder since Freiburg first won promotion to the Bundesliga in 1993.
But the business realities of the modern game are brutal. For every euro Freiburg earns, Bayern earns roughly eight. Freiburg’s big rivals spend more on just one or two players than it spent hiring its entire starting XI.
