Democratic Germany leads free-market England in football's recovery

[Lars77]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/21/german-english-football-recovery?CMP=twt_gu

At their first home Premier League match this season, Chelsea, owned by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, beat Reading 4-2 in front of 41,733 all-seated supporters whose season tickets at Stamford Bridge, apart from a small family area, cost a minimum £750. Last season's champions in Germany's Bundesliga, Borussia Dortmund, began this one by beating Werder Bremen 2-1, watched by 80,645 people, including 24,454 fans in a vast standing area, paying €187 (£148) for their season tickets.

That gulf in price and experience illustrates a profound difference in philosophy between hyper-commercialised, "free-market" English football and the more democratic German approach to what we used to call "the people's game". In both countries, football has been revitalised since the grim end of the 1980s, when 96 Liverpool supporters were killed in English football's worst disaster at Hillsborough, and average crowds in the Bundesliga sank to 17,291.

German football has staged a recovery every bit as remarkable as that of the English game, but without surrendering some of the popular traditions, such as standing areas for fans and cheaper tickets. In 1993, contemplating outbreaks of hooliganism at Bundesliga grounds, the German FA, the Deutscher Fussball Bund, considered following England's lead and making all-seat stadiums compulsory. It decided to keep standing areas, in a statement cherished by the Football Supporters Federation in England: "Football, being a people's sport, should not banish the socially disadvantaged from its stadia, and it should not place its social function in doubt."

Just this year, the English FA told a Commons select committee for culture, media and sport inquiry that it considered issues such as ticket prices to be outside its jurisdiction. The general secretary, Alex Horne, said the FA believed in a "free-market approach" to club ownership.

[T_i_B]

1. It's widely accepted by even diehard fans....

....that the influx of money into the English game, especially in regard to the vastly inflated wages of the players has not been wholly positive.