German clubs face uncertain future as Bayer drops sports

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Clubs face uncertain future as Bayer drops top sports - Feature

Posted : Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:14:03 GMT
Author : DPA
Category : Sports
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Hamburg - German pole vault star Danny Ecker is a prime example of the top sport sponsoring at chemical industry giants Bayer which is now all but coming to an end. Ecker competes for the Bayer works club TSV Bayer Leverkusen. So did his mother Heide Ecker-Rosendahl, who won long jump and 4x100 metres gold as well as pentathlon silver at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
The 2007 world championship bronze medallist Ecker would have never been born had not his father John Ecker come to Germany from the US to play basketball at Bayer Leverkusen in the 1970s.
But history and family tradition means nothing in the cool calculations of Bayer managers who announced on May 21, 2007, that the company will end its professional sports sponsoring in all areas apart from football.
The basketball team is desperately looking for new sponsors amid a fan initiative, handballers and volleyballers are also feeling the heat while the athletics stars such as Ecker will be supported for another year to compete at the Beijing Olympics and the 2009 world championships on home ground in Berlin.
A total 50,000 people are listed in the 27 clubs run by Bayer in Leverkusen and its other sites, making Bayer one of the biggest sports sponsors in the country.
Bayer promised it will continue to support these clubs on the amateur level with some 14 million euros per year. The main club, TSV Bayer Leverkusen, ran up a deficit of around 900,000 euros in 2006 and 1.5 million euros in 2005. The 2007 figures are due next month.
On the professional side, the footballers get 25 of the 30 million euros Bayer spends on its teams - and only they will be funded from 2009 onwards.
Ecker, 30, is not amused about the future.
"Leverkusen stood for diversity in sport - I consider it reckless to question everything apart from football," he told Wednesday's edition of the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily.
The Bayer company proudly lists Heide Rosendahl on its website among the club's top athletes which also include high jump Olympic champions Ulrike Meyfarth and Heike Henkel.
Germany's first basketball player to be hired into the NBA, Detlef Schrempf, started his career as well in Leverkusen.
"Athletes wearing the Bayer cross have collected a total of 60 Olympic medals, have won almost two hundred World Championship medals and over one hundred European Championship titles, and have stood on the winner's podium at German national championships on countless occasions," says Bayer on its website.
The footballer's success, by contrast, is modest.
Bayer have been in the Bundesliga since 1979 but have the reputation of being perennial runners-up, highlighted in 2002 when the team finished second in the league, lost the European Champions League final to Real Madrid and the German cup final to Schalke.
The only trophies are the 1988 UEFA Cup and 1993 German cup for a club which long had a dull image, but then managed to lure the likes of Bernd Schuster, Rudi Voeller and Michael Ballack to play for them.
But Bayer communications director Michael Schade said last year there was no sport like football for its sponsoring.
"Spending advertising money in professional sport has the aim to raise awareness for our company and its brands. The biggest image gain can be best reached through football," he said.
Basketball is not as popular as football in Germany and Leverkusen's record 14 national titles of no importance.
The class of 2008 is ranked fourth in the league in what is seen as the farewell tour.
The issue is big again this week because neighbouring Cologne has filed for insolvency and Leverkusen's future very uncertain because of a lack of new sponsors to make up for around half of the club budget of 2.5 million per year once Bayer's cashflow stops.
Manager Otto Reintjes, a former player and coach who has been at the club for more than three decades has even phoned up Schrempf in America while local fans are collecting signatures in another effort to keep the club in town.
"Detlef immediately agreed to help and asked what he could do," Reintjes said on Tuesday with less than six weeks left before the new licence procedures start.
A merger with Cologne has been mulled and there are also reportedly talks with officials in Dusseldorf, which like Cologne is only a few miles away.
The example of Bayer Uerdingen shows what can happen once the company money is no longer available, in this case since 1995.
The former Bundesliga club languishes on the fourth division and has been so desperate for money in recent weeks and months that a day as coach or a place on the team for one match was available via internet auctioneers eBay.