I manage a German soccer club and I’m a grad student
You can do it too, it’s only 5 bucks a month
The United Nations has called sport a “universal language”, but it’s really just unified in that most all professional sports teams are owned by shitty rich guys, and run by equally shitty but marginally less rich guys. Last week, despite being very poor and hopefully not too shitty, I joined their ranks. I started my new job as manager of a German professional football team, TC Freisenbruch.
My resume made me a shoe-in for the job: I played soccer until I was like 11 and I drunkenly watched a lot of the Euro Cup during the summer of 2012. I also live across the street from this bar in Austin that shows a lot of EPL games on weekend mornings. Not that I’ve ever actually been there to watch the games, but their cheering usually wakes me up, so I feel like I know enough.
But really, my biggest qualification was being willing to spend $5/month to do the job; it was actually 5 euros, but I don’t know how to make the euro sign on my keyboard. And those 5 euros technically only earned me the right to be co-manager — one of 632 of them. This is TC Freisenbruch’s whole model: they get a bunch of suckers like myself to pay to collectively do a job they would otherwise pay someone to do. But, to the club’s credit, they’re pretty serious about this whole Athenian direct democracy business. None of that Green Bay Packers “Board of Directors” nonsense — TC Freisenbruch has really have handed control of the club to their hundreds of team managers, and so far it kind of works.
The club, located just outside Essen (the Paris of West Germany, as it were), made the shift in 2016, in dire need of some cash money. And thanks to some wisdom of the crowds magic, my 631 fellow co-managers and I have yet to truly run the team into the ground. In fact, during their first year under group management, they were the top team in Germany for most of the season (in the ninth division, that is). This year they’ve fallen to the middle of the pack, but have a positive goal differential and are still only a few points out of the top 4, so I’m hoping my insights gained from having watched some friends play FIFA and following a few soccer fans on Twitter will really bring us back to the top.
Though the interface may resemble it, this isn’t some fantasy stunt. The team is truly governed by the whims of a bunch of randos — mostly in Germany, but there’s a solid American caucus of two dozen people as well. Before the season started, an open ballot decided which formations the team would use. We vote on which preseason matches to schedule. We even choose the lineup (is that the right word?) before each game.
There’s an option to defer to the coach’s decision in setting lineups, but the club didn’t bring me on to pass the buck to someone else. Their (our?) next match is against archrival club Prussians Ebrahim, so I’ve committed to taking my vote extremely seriously. Unfortunately, as I learned too late, the German word for goalie is torwart, which looks an awful lot like forward, so I accidentally voted to fill our front line with all our keepers. But other than that, I was extremely conscientious with my picks. Steve Feind, for example, needs to start because his name translates to Steve Enemy, which I think all my co-managers will agree is extremely badass. Daniel Heising and Sven Winter also need to get a lot of playing time as well, mostly because they’re very hot. Anyway.
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My new responsibilities carry over to off-the-field stuff, too. We’re responsible for allocating TC Freisenbruch’s €60,000 budget each year (I found the euro sign, thanks) to marketing, merchandising, personnel, infrastructure, and whatever “youth” means. Entrusting this to the wisdom of crowds also seems to be paying off, as the team profited like €15,000 last year and also the managers voted for the team to start selling these hella fly scarves.
In a bit of a dystopian turn, we can also fire coaches, players, and trainers. If anyone’s ‘community trust’ meter falls below 60%, they’re gone. Not wanting to be responsible for anyone losing their job, I’m leaving all mine at 100%. And it looks like the new coach is safe for now, rocking a solid 98.2% (the last coach quit after falling into the 70s). But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from being Too Online, it’s that you probably don’t want your job security tied to the opinions of a bunch of strangers who are also probably Too Online.
But honestly, the whole thing is a pretty rad experiment on pushing the boundaries of fan and community ownership. A lot of soccer teams on mainland Europe are technically ‘fan owned,’ even giants like Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. But none give their fans the voice in decision making that TC Freisenbruch does. And though there’s no way this will start any sort of trend, it’s still fun to see my squad whoop up on some other ninth division team every few weeks.
