BarcelonaThe Schwabing district of Munich had a reputation for being the bastion of artists, bohemians and the shameless in a traditionally conservative city such as the Catholic and monarchical Bavarian capital. It was here that Bayern was founded in 1900, when a group of young idealists who loved the good life gathered in a tavern. Little could they have imagined that they were creating one of the most powerful football teams in the world, Barça’s nightmare, which has only been able to defeat Bayern twice in 14 matches. The Germans, on the other hand, have prevailed on 10 occasions, with defeats as painful as the 2-8 in Lisbon. A club where private ownership owns shares in the entity, although the members still control it. A mixed model that has always attracted the attention of many Barça fans, who have explored the possibility of copying it, as was considered in discussions with Ferran Reverter when he was CEO of Barça last season, and also during Bartomeu’s time .
Just when this 20th century was born that would tear the soul of Europe in half, Bayern was founded. In 1900, some footballers from Munich’s MTV, a multi-sport club in the city, quarreled with the board when it rejected their request that they defend the association’s membership of the Southern Football Association from Germany One of those controversies that now seem like a small thing, but which marked the future of so many European clubs, such as Barça itself or Inter, which split from Milan after discussing what should be done with foreign players. In Bavaria, the rebellious footballers gathered in the Bäckerhöfl tavern, between beers, to decide what to do. Half of the players proposed to split and create a club. The others preferred to stick to MTV. The 11 rebellious footballers went to the Gisela restaurant, in the neighborhood of Schwabing, to found Bayern and add to the cause some friends they knew from their nocturnal adventures in the neighborhood.
Of the 17 founders of Bayern, two were Jews, one of whom was Benno Elkan, who would later become a famous sculptor, author of a work that the British government would give to Israel decades later to remember the victims of the Holocaust. The sculpture is now installed on the esplanade in front of Israel’s parliament building, the Knesset, where Bayern laid a wreath when they played in Jerusalem in 2004. Curiously born in Dortmund, city of one of Bayern’s biggest rivals, Elkan had been educated abroad, where he had fallen in love with football thanks to his English teachers. In 1897, he traveled to Munich to take the exams to enter the prestigious private art academy of the painter Walter Thor. He would be admitted, and he would meet the other founders of Bayern on the streets of Schwabing. Yes, Bayern had founders who were mostly artists and peculiar people.
A club chaired by the enemies of Nazism
The first president of the club, for example, was Franz John, a photographer. Born in the state of Brandenburg, near Berlin, he experimented with photography in the streets of Schwabing. The second president would be the Dutch Willem Hesselink, a chemistry and philosophy student who left for posterity a doctoral thesis on port wine before becoming one of the first experts in the use of science to try to solve crimes in Netherlands. The third president would be Angelo Knorr, a chemist passionate about literature who acted as patron of artists and would suffer a tragic fate: in 1913 he was arrested for being homosexual – at that time homosexuality was a crime in Germany. Knorr would be forced to go through psychiatric centers to “cure” his problems, forced by his family, and he would die of depression at the age of 50. In recent years, Bayern has recovered its figure and turned it into a symbol of the fight against homophobia.
When Knorr was arrested, the president of Bayern was already Kurt Landauer, who would be in charge of protecting him when the police questioned the management of the entity investigating the behavior of the chemist. Landauer was the first Jewish president of Bayern, a symbolic fact in a city where until a few years before the birth of the club it had been the independent kingdom of Bavaria, conservative and Catholic, values represented by the other entity of the city, Munich 1860. Bayern, on the other hand, was already born with a modern and open look, above religions and birth parties, with foreigners and free souls in its meetings. Landauer was a club player in 1902, leaving shortly afterwards for Switzerland and Italy to study and work. When he returned in 1911, it was not long before he was elected president, understanding that a football club had to be managed by other methods. He secured the first advertising contracts and sought coaches away from Munich to improve the level of the team, so that Bayern soon surpassed the other teams in the region. Thus, he would sign the Austrian Richard Hilly Kohn, a coach famous for his defensive concepts who would also work at Barça, as we recalled in this report.
Thanks to Dombi, who was Jewish like Landauer, Bayern would win the German league for the first time in 1932. Kohn signed good players like Oscar Rohr, a man who always opposed Nazism and was captured by the Gestapo while playing French Rohr would end up imprisoned and sentenced to fight on the Russian front, although he survived. Dombi fled Germany in time, while Landauer preferred to stay. The Nazis – Hitler had run down the same streets as the club’s founders – considered Bayern one Jewish club, a Jewish club. One of Landauer’s cousins, for example, the lawyer Michael Siegel, was led through the city center by the Nazis with his pants cut off and a sign around his neck that read: “I will not complain to the police again.” since he had filed a complaint against a Nazi. Landauer would resign a few days later to become head of advertising at the publishing house Knorr & Hirth, a position he did not last long as the Nazis forced the company to fire him, so he ended up working in the laundry of a relative before being interned in the Dachau concentration camp, from which he was able to leave thanks to the decorations he had from when he had fought in the First World War with the German army. Thanks to this war record and pressure from the Bayern board, they let him go. He would go to Switzerland, where he survived the war and was re-elected Bayern president once he was able to return home.
A multinational where the partners still rule
Landauer died in 1961, just as the batch of players was arriving that would make the club the most powerful in Germany. Bayern currently has around 293,000 members right now and has won 50% of German leagues in the last few decades. And all, with a management where ex-players always stand out. Until the 60s, when it went up to Primera never to be relegated again, the club had only one league, that of Landauer and Richard Kohn. But that generation of Beckenbauer, Hoeness, Maier or Müller changed everything. On and off the pitch. In the last 20 years, the club has been presided over by ex-champions of Europe such as Uli Hoeness, Oliver Kahn, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge or Franz Beckenbauer. In addition, the Bavarians have found an interesting enough balance between including large companies in the project and continuing in the hands of partners.
In Germany, all clubs must follow the 50+1 rule, according to which at least 51% of the teams’ shares must belong to the members, with some exceptions such as clubs that were already founded by a company, like Bayer Leverkusen or Wolfsburg, born in the Volkswagen factory. In the case of Bayern, the partners control 75% of the club through a company. The remaining 25% is held by three giant multinationals, each with 8.33%: Audi, Adidas and Allianz. All three with a common denominator: they are companies born in Bavaria. The sportswear brand Adidas was the first to become a shareholder, in 2002, when it paid 77 million that would be used to build the new stadium, the Allianz Arena, initially shared with Munich 1860, although with the Over time, Bayern bought their share from their neighbor. In 2009, Audi entered by paying 90 million, and in 2014 the insurer Allianz paid 110 million, money invested to finish repaying the debts related to a stadium that the club now controls 100%. And that it has already paid off, after opening it before the 2006 World Cup.
In fact, it was Rummenigge and Hoeness who, in 1998, made a strong bet, at a congress of the German Football Association held in Wiesbaden, to get German football laws changed to allow clubs to become joint-stock companies. The mixture of ex-footballers and businessmen is also clear in a Bayern supervisory board of nine members, who are often ex-employees or managers of giant companies, such as Herbert Hainer (was CEO of Adidas), Herbert Dies (president of Volkswagen) , Werner Zedelius (Allianz), Timotheus Höttges (CEO of Deutsche Telekom) or Michael Diederich, from UniCredit Bank. A mixed model, where the shareholders have power, but also private companies, which has always been analyzed from Barcelona.
