Whatever goes up, must come down. And so today’s football imperium must be on guard – against itself. 

Football Sold out stadiums Football Sold out stadiums
Images: Getty Images

Everywhere you look right now, football – in its various national guises – is king. Soccer in Europe, Africa, South America, gridiron in the States, the oval-ball codes in the antipodes – all are unchallenged. It’s a truth revealed in the hard numbers of television ratings. A 2010 London study found the Champions League final had bumped the Super Bowl as the world’s most-watched annual sporting event. In ‘09 an average audience of 109 million watched Barcelona skewer Manchester United in Rome, three million more than watched the Steelers edge the Cardinals in Tampa. To put those numbers in context, the third most-watched event was F1’s season-opening Bahrain GP, drawing 54 million pairs of eyes. Fourth place went to the 100m final of the Athletics World Champs which drew 33 million. Down here the numbers are equally conclusive. Last year’s AFL grand final (take one) drew an average audience of 3.7 million, the NRL grand final 3.1 million. Day one of the Boxing Day Test, by contrast, drew 1.3 million. The football empire is at its apogee. And it looks utterly invincible.

The thing with sporting empires, however, is that they rise and fall. Fifty years ago, the three most popular sports in America were boxing, horse racing and baseball. These days all three have been superseded by MMA, basketball and gridiron. In Australia tennis has suffered a similar fate: 40 years ago it was neck-and-neck with cricket as our national summer sport, now it’s a three-week blip on the January radar. Sporting empires tumble and their fall is never easy to predict.

As a rule, empires collapse because they overextend themselves ‒ and this would seem to be the state of the footballing imperium right now. In Europe, unbridled capitalism has seen exploding costs, mounting debts and eroding cultures. The English Premier League is the prime example: a transnational space where monumental egos compile mountainous debt. In the States, the NFL is intent on its farcical global expansion, despite its 16-year NFL Europa experiment bleeding $30 million a year. In Australia, meanwhile, we’re witnessing the opening exchanges of an imbecilic code war; the AFL and NRL intent on driving into one another’s territory. Ego, arrogance, profligacy – football might just be starting to show some of the bloat Rome were showing as the Vandals massed at the gates.

If there’s an answer, it might be found in Germany. Amidst the corruption and degeneracy of European football, the Bundesliga is a beacon of white light. It’s the only “viable” football league in Europe, the only major league where the collected clubs finish each season in the black. The league relies on three chief revenue streams: matchday earnings, sponsorship receipts and broadcast income. Last season these streams ran to a profit of $2.3 billion.

Other European leagues judge their success on how much European silverware they can hoard. The Bundesliga judges its success on the satisfaction of the fan. Clubs are forced to limit season passes so tickets can still be bought on matchday; away teams have a right to 10 per cent of the stadium seating. At Borussia Dortmund’s 81,000-seat Westfalenstadion, the average ticket price is $20 and the bars serve full-strength beer. The club averages a home crowd of 73,000 (pictured). The league has an average attendance topping 42,000. Italy’s Serie A, by contrast, averages 25,000.

True, Germany may not have produced a Champions League winner since Bayern beat Valencia in the ’01 decider, or a Europa League winner since Schalke beat Inter in the ’97 final. But the Bundesliga is making money and that overflow is constantly tipped back into the game. It’s been a decade-long stipulation in the league that each club must run an academy fostering local talent. Over $100 million is annually emptied into these academies and the benefits are evident: Germany is European Champion at U17, U19, and U21 level.

The Bundesliga’s lesson is simple: there is another way. To be successful, football leagues don’t have to be growing bigger, louder, more expensive; they don’t have to be looking outwards, growing their borders, annexing foreign fields. Sometimes, looking inwards, looking at the old bloke sitting in the stand with the club jersey on and the cup of plastic beer in his hand, is the best fiscal policy.

‒ Aaron Scott