Still fair? About rich and poor in the Bundesliga

There are a Bundesliga tablewhich is full of injustice: the distribution of media revenues to the 18 clubs. At the top: Bayern with almost 101 million euros. At the bottom: newly promoted Holstein Kiel with 31.5 million euros. Somewhere in between: runners-up VfB Stuttgart with 56 million euros, traditional club Werder Bremen with 44.8 million euros and Borussia Mönchengladbach with 60.3 million euros.

The money comes from the Bundesliga’s TV marketing and was most recently around 1.2 billion euros (including the 2nd division). The new tender for the 2025/26 season has not yet been decided. After that, negotiations will begin on how the cake will be divided up: how big each of the 36 pieces should be. Agreement has always been reached. But the pieces of the cake also turned out to be different sizes.

Wherever you look, the gap to Bayern Munich is so big that the record champions always get the most money and therefore always the best players. Even Borussia Dortmund is lagging behind with 89.7 million euros. The gap is ten percent – that’s a lot. You could say that the distribution of money depends on performance. True – but still unfair.

Because every Bundesliga team that finishes the season in the best third gets a bonus by qualifying for the European Cup. UEFA gives every participant in the Champions League a starting fee of almost 19 million euros. The payout can be multiplied with point and victory bonuses. The winner can even collect 100 million euros at the end. 100,000,000 euros!

There is a saying: the devil always shits on the biggest pile. That is a drastic formulation and essentially true: how is a club that is at the bottom supposed to compensate for the financial disadvantage? Sometimes it succeeds – like VfB Stuttgart did last year. But that is the exception. The distribution of money manifests the three-class society in the Bundesliga.

The big shots at the top, the average in the middle, the poor ones at the bottom: the league is rarely turned upside down like this. Bayern will not give up a single cent for more justice when the new round of wage negotiations begins in the autumn after the media rights have been awarded. But for all that money they should have dared to experiment with CR7.*

*The last sentence was a joke.