One or the other member of the football business may have at least smirked when Hans-Joachim Watzke recently said after being elected to the supervisory board of the two national leagues (DFL) that he had successfully shirked an office like this for 17 years, but now the others had him Parishioners stop “caught at a weak point”. With the vote of 32 of the 34 club representatives present, he is now responsible, said Watzke – and sounded like a politician who has finally, finally reached his goal, and whose happiness at the moment only knows one flaw: Who, damn it mal, are the two deviants who ruined the unanimous result?
But the sound of the words is deceptive. The 62-year-old managing director of Borussia Dortmund is certainly not an unpretentious man, yet, as experts assure, his calling on duty was not flirtatious. Watzke likes being boss at BVB and social intercourse with the patricians who head the big clubs in Madrid, Barcelona or Turin – however, a position as an official in the DFL has not yet seemed desirable to him.
Now, however, he considers his energetic commitment to be necessary. After the retirement of DFL managing director Christian Seifert at the end of the year and the resignation of Munich spokesman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, who retired last summer, influential personalities have been lost in German professional football. A vacuum had already emerged in recent months when Rummenigge no longer appeared in the media as a demanding pioneer in the industry, but above all as a nostalgic narrator, while Seifert was preparing to hand over the business to his successor Donata Hopfen and becoming increasingly diplomatic held back when the Bundesliga was open to public debate.
The clubs expect more public partisanship from the DFL
Watzke has already met Hopfen, 44, and rumors are circulating in the industry about the encounter that the experienced football manager first explained to the new employee how things are going. Whether this is really true or just reflects the expected cliché is initially not important. What is certain is that Hopfen has not taken on any task that she can comfortably familiarize herself with. The corona crisis is entering its third year, the clubs are suffering from the return of deficiency symptoms and the restrictions imposed on them by the politics of ghost gaming.
This is an acute challenge for Hopfen. The clubs expect more public partisanship from the DFL after Seifert recently remained discreet because he thought it was necessary – and because he was tired of the populist debates in the political circus. When Watzke now says that the league must again “accentuate” its “original rights” and “make football shine again”, Donata Hopfen can understand that as a mandate.
However, some clubs are also busy coping with the loss of personal charisma in their own company. Watzkes BVB is one of them, in the summer sports director Michael Zorc leaves the club, which he joined at a time when Willi “Ente” Lippens and Lothar Huber were still running the Westfalenstadion. The historical roots could lead one to believe that Zorc is definitely at least 100 years old, but in truth he is only 59 and could still be of great service to the club with his football knowledge, his contacts and his Westphalian and slippery nature for a long time – but he doesn’t want to.
Zorc has had enough, as has Rudi Völler in Leverkusen, who also leaves a painful void at Bayer 04. The office will function without Völler, but the football club will miss him enormously. Sebastian Kehl and Edin Terzic are already on duty as successors in Dortmund, as are Simon Rolfes and Stefan Kießling in Leverkusen – and Oliver Kahn at FC Bayern. For them, 2022 will be a year of profiling, but it wouldn’t hurt if they used Watzke’s word for New Year’s Eve: to let the Bundesliga shine again.