The 28th of July 1962, is a very important date in the history of German football.
Fifty year ago today, during the general assembly of the German Football Association (DFB), at the Westfalenhalle in Dortmund, delegates from the regional football associations approved an official motion for the formation of a national, professional league, to commence in the 1963-64 season.
The first steps towards a professional league were made in 1949 when part-time (semi) professionalism was introduced. Played purely at an amateur level in a large number of sub-regional leagues until then, an important reform was that the regional Oberligen (First Divison Leagues) were reduced to five regions (North, South, West, Southwest and Berlin) and the term ‘Vertragsspieler’ (player under contract) was created in German football.
That was not how German football had worked until that time. Regional champions and runners-up played a series of play-off matches for the right to compete in a final game for the national championship and a club’s players were members who had signed an application form. A ‘player under contract’ was something akin to an employee, but he was not a full professional. Calling him that would have put the charitable status of the clubs in jeopardy and with it their tax benefits and many other advantages.
A salary cap was set that would, by and large, survive the next 15 years. The basic wage could not exceed DM320 at the time, the maximum match bonus was DM80, al per month. Also, a ‘player under contract’ had to have a regular job and prove he was actually practising it. In 1949, the Oberliga West and Oberliga Nord adopted this set-up and the others soon followed suit.
There were however fundamental problems with the Oberliga system. With ever more clubs gradually or not so gradually becoming ever more professional, a two-tier football society was developing. Each regional Oberliga became increasingly dominated by the same few teams.
From 1955 to 1958, the title races were dominated by clubs from the Oberliga West. Helmut Rahn’s Rot-Weiss Essen beat Kaiserslautern 4-3 in the 1955 final. Then, Borussia Dortmund triumphed in 1956 and 1957, before Schalke won their last championship for the remainder of the century by crushing Hamburg 3-0 in 1958.
The subsequent lack of real competition meant that German clubs found themselves lagging behind their European counterparts, with teams from nations such as Spain and Italy - countries with professional national leagues - dominating the early years of European club competition.
The Vertragsspieler system, noble as the concept was, did not prevent footballers from seeking greener pastures. It was nice to be able to pocket money legally at last, but places existed where it was even nicer. Hans Poschl of Nurnberg, became the first post player to move abroad when he joined Grasshoppers Zurich in March 1949. Even Switzerland was, in Poschl’s words, a ‘land of milk and honey’ compared to West Germany.
In November of the same year, 1860 Munich’s Ludwig Janda signed for Fiorentina, the first German to move to Italy. The club received a transfer fee of DM30,000 and Janda got an astronomical wage rise. Soon, the issue of money and foreign clubs with deep pockets became a problem of national concern.
The top German international players of the time, like the Walter brothers, Fritz and Ottmar, Helmut Rahn and Franz Islacker were tempted by lucrative offers from France, Spain and even Argentina. In all cases the players declined the offers, partly because their clubs, and especially national team coach Sepp Herberger, moved heaven and earth to find ways of giving them financial security – like granting them loans to start a business.
Another reason for the players’ reluctance to follow the trail of money was that they knew they would never again play for their country if they let themselves be bought. And last, but not least, they were regular, average Germans moulded by almost 100 years of glorifying the amateur spirit and condemning professionalism, living in a country that was beginning to prosper against all odds thanks to work ethic and communal spirit.
But for how much longer?
Sepp Herberger was no friend of professionalism. Indeed he viewed money as something akin to the root of all evil. But he was also a pragmatist and a man whose job was to produce a strong national team. That is why he lobbied for the creation of a nationwide league that would earn the players more money and certainly raise the standard of play compared to the Oberliga mess.
Few people listened, but he had the backing of two other visionaries. One was FC Cologne’s cigar-munching then president Franz Kremer, who had visions of greater things exemplified by his decree that his team had to play in all-white, in order to look like Real Madrid. He came out in support of a national league for Germany as early as 1949 and was chairman of the “Society for the Bundesliga and professional football”.
However, another attempt to create a unified league for West Germany at the 1958 DFB congress in Frankfurt was also unsuccessful.
Hermann Neuberger, then president of the independent state of Saarland, who would later also become DFB president, was particularly keen on bringing together the best German clubs in an attempt to create a larger market for German football while also improving its quality.
That the Bundesliga came into being at all was due to furious lobbying by Herberger, Kremer and Neuberger and the threat of players moving southward. But above all it was thanks to West Germany’s depressing performance at the 1962 World Cup in Chile (eliminated by Yugoslavia in the quarter finals to general criticism that the Germans had played too defensively) that had a positive side-effect.
The regional FA of West Germany, led by Franz Kremer, had introduced an official motion in 1961 that asked the DFB to consider the setting up of a national professional league. A commission was formed to examine the motion and check the implications and its report led the DFB’s advisory council to propose that the FA’s ruling council should vote in favour during a general meeting.
On 28 July 1962, the 131 representatives of the DFB council met in Dortmund to take a vote on the Bundesliga. The result was announced at 5.45pm – two ballot papers were spoiled, 26 said no, 103 said yes. The new one-tiered nationwide league was to kick off on 24 August, 1963 – 34 years after Italy’s Serie A, 35 years after Spain’s Primera Liga and 75 years after England’s Football League.
On the question of professionalism, the delegates had decided to defer a real decision. Another commission was created and given the task of coming up with statutes for the legalisation of a Lizenspieler (licensed player).
Like the old ‘player under contract’, the new ‘licensed player’ was not a full-blown professional. The main difference was that the licensed player no longer had to have a regular job and that he was allowed to earn more money. The new maximum basic salary was DM500 a month, but DM700 in bonus payments was sanctioned, so that a footballer could legally earn DM1,200. Further, the maximum transfer sum was fixed at DM50,000, 20 per cent of which could go into the player’s pockets.
The Bundesliga was to be made up of 16 Oberliga clubs, chosen on the basis of current form, points accumulated over the past decade and economic stability. No city was to initially be represented by more than one club in the new league. Moreover, the two 1963 finalists (Borussia Dortmund and FC Cologne) would be automatically admitted. In early 1963, Franz Kremer met Hermann Neuberger and three other officials in the DFB’s Frankfurt headquarters. They came up with nine names of clubs that would be certain of a place in the new top flight. Hamburg and Werder Bremen from the North, Nuremberg and Eintracht Frankfurt from the South, Cologne, Schalke and Borussia Dortmund from the west, 1FC Saarbrucken from south west and Hertha Berlin from stadt Berlin. Later in May, the DFB announced the names of the remaining seven clubs that would make up the new league after protests and complaints from some other 13 clubs (among them Bayern Munich) who did not make it. MSV Duisburg (then called SV Meiderich and Prussen Munster from the west, Eintracht Braunschweig from the north, 1860 Munich, VfB Stuttgart and Karlsruher from the south and Kaiserslautern from south west completed the list of successful applicants.
When the first round of Bundesliga matches kicked off in eight stadiums on 24 August 1963, watched by 327,000 spectators, and Borussia Dortmund’s Timo Konietzka scored the first goal in league history after just 58 seconds, all the years of hard work put in by officials to create the rules and structures of the new national competition had come to fruition. The idea of a single, integrated professional league, first contemplated decades earlier by a handful of visionaries, had finally become a reality. The German Bundsliga was born.
References: ‘Tor’ by Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger