The White Pelè
Human Highlight Reel
Bayern destroy Mainz. 6-1 FT. Big away win for Cologne. Schalke win as well. Leverkusen and Wolfsburg draw, instead.
Dortmund now.
Dortmund now.
Bit of a weird game. Both teams looke pretty crap in the final third. Gotta say I'm a big fan of Josip Brekalo, would be interested to have him here.Wolfsburg still unbeaten after the draw against Fortuna.
Bit of a weird game. Both teams looke pretty crap in the final third. Gotta say I'm a big fan of Josip Brekalo, would be interested to have him here.
Watched this game last night, not much to say about the football as it was dull but Fortuna Dusseldorf's stadium.. how? Looks massive and I thought they were a small club (I dont have much knowledge on them).
Are a lot of stadiums in Bundesliga like this? They all seem to be well kept and the clubs doing well financially.
I cant recall from all the Bundesliga games I've watched that any of the clubs had a ****ty stadium, they all seemed new and shiny?
I'm a season ticket holder for Fortuna and the stadium here is really nice. Fortuna are not the biggest team but Düsseldorf is a major city in Germany and quite well-off. As a team I'd probably compare them to Southampton or Sunderland in terms of history/success. They won the league ages ago but have been everywhere between the 1st and 4th league in the last 15 years.
The stadium was actually built in the build-up to the 2006 world cup as the city wanted to host some matches and the the previous stadium was pretty much falling apart. In the end it wasn't selected. Same story with Borussia Park in Mönchengladbach.
Most of the clubs don't own their stadiums, especially the ones with newer stadiums, they tend to be owned by the cities, but yeah, the likes of Bremen, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hannover, Nurnberg, Köln and Schalke all have 40,000+ seats. The newer stadiums here are usually bigger. Schalke, Munich, Mainz, Mönchengladbach, Hoffenheim, Augsburg and Fortuna have all moved to new stadiums since 2000. The others usually keep their stadiums in good shape and renovate/refurbish them regularly, but you still have some really traditional grounds like Freiburg, Union, Dortmund, Nurnburg and Köln.
The BL clubs are mostly fine financially because of the 50+1 rule which prevents anyone from having a controlling share of the club. The fans always retain a majority and generally have the club's best interests at heart and don't splash the cash so much, which is why you don't get situations such as Bolton/Bury so often. Having said that some massive clubs such as Kaiserslauten and Karlsruhe have had issues in recent years while many of the former East Germany clubs are still catching up. But I think this system is much better for both the fans and the league, it really encourages smart spending and youth development rather than throwing money at new players.