Around Europe: RB Leipzig’s Bundesliga promotion met with derision, not celebration

Dresden fans holding a banner reading "you cannot buy tradition", directed toward opponent RB Leipzig last week. Thomas Eisenhuth / AFP

The authorities are still wondering how the carcass was smuggled into the stadium.

Police at Dresden have found a discarded box that they reckon might have concealed a bull’s head that later became a missile. The head was hurled towards the pitch from a part of the stand where home fans were collected when Dynamo Dresden took on Leipzig in the German Cup last weekend. The police are yet to identify who threw it.

Fortunately, the missile landed without causing injury. But it made its point – a grotesque, widely published image of the sort Germany’s most upwardly mobile football club did not want to usher to their first match in the Bundesliga’s top flight.

Leipzig make that historic debut on Sunday, at Hoffenheim. After what happened at Dresden, they may feel glad to be at a low-key venue and away from their own East Germany.

Leipzig, known affectionately as “The Bulls” are the first club in the upper tier of the German league since 2009 from what, up until unification in 1990, was another country – the German Democratic Republic. The other side of the Iron Curtain. Their arrival ought to be cause for celebration for that fact.

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Much of East Germany still feels like a deprived part of the country, and its representation at the summit of the country’s most popular sport has been sketchy. Since Energie Cottbus were relegated seven summers ago, the Bundesliga’s top 18 clubs have all been from what used to be West Germany.

That year, a project was under way to revitalise football at Leipzig. They were a club started from scratch, but they had a significant advantage – the patronage of the Red Bull distillery, a multinational brand par excellence and backers of all sorts of sporting franchises from Formula One teams to the champion football club of Austria, Salzburg. Leipzig have certainly been given wings by the investment.

In May they celebrated their fifth promotion in seven years. So why the hostility?

It was spelt out by Dresden fans in more lucid ways than the symbolic, bloodied bull’s head during the cup tie – won on penalties by Leipzig – last weekend. Banners proclaimed “Bulls belong in the zoo”, and “You can’t buy tradition”.

There is regional envy, certainly. Dresden, powerful in the old East German national league, have been eclipsed by the upstarts from Leipzig, but resentment covers the whole of united Germany.

“Leipzig’s model is not one I prefer,” Borussia Dortmund chief executive Hans-Joachim Watzke said.

He was speaking for a Bundesliga that is suspicious of the sort of big-business takeover that is characteristic of club football in, say, the Premier League.

In Germany, the so-called “50+1” rule is supposed to preserve a majority stake in most clubs for ordinary shareholders, ideally fans. Leipzig are thought to have abused the spirit of that rule by distributing over half their shares to Red Bull associates. They have been aggressively outspending their peers in their journey up the divisions. They are also deemed to have been sly with the club’s name.

Corporate names are forbidden. So technically RB Leipzig – as they are officially named – are “Rasenball Leipzig” or “grass ball”, but the abbreviation, RB, clearly serves another purpose.

"RB Leipzig – curse or blessing?" popular magazine Kicker asked last week ahead of a debate about the most intriguing new addition to the elite level of German club football.

“We are doing a professional job and, although some people may not like us, we will carry on in the direction we are going,” club director Ralf Rangnick told the magazine.

Rangnick, who is a respected figure for having led Schalke to the semi-finals of the Uefa Champions League in 2011 as manager, pointed out that Leipzig have set up a widely envied youth academy. He might have added that their fan-base has also grown considerably and in a very short time.

The Bulls of the East may not be universally loved, but German football cannot ignore their charge through the hierarchy.

And if Leipzig’s backers fulfil their longer-term ambitions, the elite European club competitions will soon be recognising the club as a serious player, too.

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