Dhe path to the leader leads up a steep hill. At the apex of the Mühlenberg, above the slate-covered old town, there is a modernized triple sports hall in Wipperfürth. Andreas-Peter Lamsfuss moves in it on the matchdays of the Badminton Bundesliga like in his second living room. There was no detail that he didn’t take care of himself, from the microphone for the hall announcer to the ball machines. Hardly any viewers that he did not personally greet and say goodbye to. “Tell your friends,” he then says jovially while shaking many hands, “or just bring them next time!”
This is how a man of conviction promotes his affair of the heart. It’s been twelve years since the 64-year-old spun off the badminton department of a sports club, for which he had played for a long time, and founded 1. BC Wipperfeld. A village club, 40 kilometers from Cologne, which after all played in the regional league – and climbed higher and higher over the years. Until he arrived in the Bundesliga, where he became second in the championship in 2021 and German champion for the first time in 2022. Which is actually not possible, as he likes to emphasize: “We have 1,600 people here, including all farms, and no performance center. So we shouldn’t be where we are now.”
Building a brand
This weekend, the club’s first team has an opportunity to repeat last year’s triumph. In Saarbrücken she is back in the Bundesliga final round for the title, the “Final Four”, which she reached directly as the leader of the table. There she will deal with TV Refrath this Saturday (4 p.m. on Sportdeutschland.TV). The winner of this derby meets either SV Fun-Ball Dortelweil from Bad Vilbel in Hesse or 1. FC Saarbrücken-Bischmisheim on Sunday.
For Lamsfuss, the fact that this final should be reached and, if possible, won also has something to do with building a brand. “That would be of fundamental importance for the image of our association,” says Lamsfuss, who works as a company developer and project manager for energy networks during the week. “We want to take the next steps soon, and that would make it easier to perform.”
Three euros for the potato salad
Hardly any other of the ten Bundesliga clubs between Neumünster and Neuhausen-Nymphenburg, where the sport is mostly practiced solidly but without bold visions, speaks like this. Most of them are happy about every spectator on match days who does not belong to the inner circle of officials and families. This is not (yet) different in Wipperfürth. So far, less than a hundred spectators in the Voss Arena have spent twelve euros on tickets and three euros on potato salad.
“The problem is that badminton has not yet been discovered by television,” claims Lamsfuss. “Otherwise our sport would get a completely different attention. Here are top players and European champions, the game is not too complex. But public interest has to be aroused first, and for that we need new marketing storms now.”
From a sporting point of view, his product already has international format. Professionals from Scotland and Scandinavia, France and the Baltic States fly in for the league weekends to score points in the 1. BCW jersey the next day. There are also German cracks like Lamsfuss’ son Mark, who became two-time European champion last year, his doubles partner Marvin Seidel or Thuc Phuong Nguyen, who was poached from Hamburg. The financial expense for this guard would be difficult for some competitors to cope with. That’s why in the league there are whispers about “BC Wippergeld”.
Smugness and envy are hard earned. In more difficult years, the chairman brought half the team under his roof before the competitive games to save costs, and cobbled together the budget with many small grants. The small-scale search for money changed mainly because of “Bernd”, as Lamsfuss calls the founder of a local company for cable and connector systems. He used to play badminton himself, initially threw in a few thousand a year and ended up becoming the main sponsor. “When the Wipperfürth people open the newspaper, they see the company logo on our jerseys in the sports section,” says Lamsfuss, “that’s meaningful.”
Targeted advertising and more successes
So they can play a little Hoffenheim an der Wupper here to try and compare it with Bundesliga football. This allows speculation about a future in which “our Gallic village” (Lamsfuss) could be a competence center and a well-known stronghold for badminton, similar to VfL Gummersbach, half an hour’s drive away, in handball.
The architectural plans for an in-house performance center are already in the drawer in the club office, which Lamsfuss has set up in the basement of his house. Now the community is supposed to grow: through the live transmission of the games on the Internet, through targeted advertising and through even more successes. In this sense, Lamsfuss & Co. would like to see the next championship title as the second part of a longer series.
