Town of 3200 Sends a Team to the Bundesliga

By: Laurie | May 20th, 2008

When you get promoted into the Bundesliga, you apparently don’t get showered with champagne. You get showered with beer.

How…German.

Beer showers were the fate of tiny little team Hoffenheim this past weekend as they celebrated their promotion into Germany’s top division. What’s particulaly interesting about Hoffenheim? Their current stadium seats only 6,350. And this stadium could pretty much fit the entire town. Twice. Their new, 30,000-seat stadium won’t be ready till 2009.

Just one year ago, they were celebrating their promotion from third-tier to second, and the goal was “getting into the Bundesliga in three to five years.” Instead, it took only one. Next year they’ll be playing in German’s top league.

So how does a town of 3200 people send a team to the Bundesliga, where they’ll be playing against teams like Bayern Munich? (For comparison, Munich’s population, according to Wikipedia, is 1,294,608.)

It helps to have friends in high places. And high tech.

Dietmar Hopp, billionaire co-founder of software company SAP, used to play for the club and still carries a soft spot for them. And in this case “carries a soft spot” translates to “gives them boatloads of cash.” He’s invested millions of euros since the early 1990s, including €40 on the new stadium, €25 million on players just in this season.

Highest-priced acquisition? Brazilian midfielder Carlos Eduardo, €8 million, pictured. (Does this kid look like a young Ronaldinho or what?)

But not everybody is happy about the team’s elevation, and it’s highlighting one of the issues for German teams: the lack of money. Individual investors are prohibited from owning a majority of any team, for one thing, which prevents rich owners from buying up teams. So you’re not going to get situations like EPL team Chelsea’s owner Roman Abramovich taking control of a team and injecting large sums of cash.

Even though media commentators have been congratulating the feisty team, Hoffenheim is hated by thousands of fans from rival clubs. “Hoffenheim is drawing a lot of hatred at the moment because it was lucky enough to get cash,” said Kirschneck.

“There are clubs which have far more tradition and from far bigger cities, such as Düsseldorf and Essen, that are languishing in the lower league because they don’t have a patron.”

(For more details on the financial situation facing German teams, click on the above link.)

But a lot of folks are happy to give credit to the club on their amazing run to the top flight.

…even Bruno Labbadia, coach of rival club Fürth which Hoffenheim routed on Sunday, voiced praise for Hoffenheim’s achievement. “Having money is one thing. Investing it wisely is something completely different,” he said.

Here are a couple of videos. The first came from Daniel, who left the link in the comments. Thanks, Daniel! (I couldn’t watch it through AOL, but it worked fine with IE.)

The second I found on YouTube. I don’t speak German, but from what I can tell, it’s the “ascension” celebration. And those are always fun.