Nationalizing the Bundesliga? Hoeness suggests a TV Tax

Uli Hoe­ness wait­ing for free money…

What would you pay for Cham­pi­ons League suc­cess? “Imag­ine if we had an extra 100 mil­lion euros avail­able, then I’d tell our fans to get ready to cel­e­brate win­ning the Cham­pi­ons League,” says Bay­ern gen­eral man­ager Uli Hoe­ness in an inter­view with Wirtschaftswoche. His pro­posal involves an increase of 2 € of Germany’s TV licens­ing fees (up from 17.96 a month, about $23.31), in order to fund pro­fes­sional clubs.

Out­side of Canada and the United States, TV licenses are a fact of life. They’re a means of financ­ing pub­lic broad­cast­ing with only lim­ited addi­tional funds. In Ger­many that fee totals approx­i­mately $280 a year. With 37 mil­lion TV house­holds, Hoeness’s pro­posal works out to about an extra $1.17 bil­lion a year. That would put them within strik­ing dis­tance of England’s and Italy’s income from tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing rights. Per­haps most excit­ing for fans, all the matches would be avail­able on pub­lic chan­nels (like ARD or ZDF). As things cur­rently stand, only a sin­gle weekly high­lights pro­gram is available.

What this amounts to, as the post’s title sug­gests, is the nation­al­iza­tion of the pro­fes­sional foot­ball in Ger­many. In one sense, this pro­posal is in keep­ing with other well-known, dis­tinctly ‘Ger­man’ aspects of foot­ball orga­ni­za­tion: working-class fans haven’t been priced out of attend­ing matches and indi­vid­ual investors aren’t per­mit­ted to own a major­ity stake in clubs. Both work to fos­ter a sense of com­mu­nity, the first by main­tain­ing a tra­di­tion­ally vocal con­stituency and the lat­ter by main­taing the (some­times illu­sory) power of par­tic­i­pa­tion amongst fans.

Things are unlikely to change in the near future, at least. Accord­ing to ARD spokesman Har­ald Dietz, “This isn’t under con­sid­er­a­tion for ARD. The TV licens­ing fee for the next four years is set, and besides we can’t influ­ence the rate. Fun­da­men­tally the TV licens­ing fee is not ear­marked, but rather set aside for our gen­eral use.”

Tagged as: ARD, FC Bayern München, Uli Hoeness