Fortuna Düsseldorf, a middleweight club of sorts based in Germany’s wealthiest city and currently active in the country’s second division, is not the most likely crucible for a revolution.
However, it is about to embark on an experiment that could have far-reaching consequences not only for the rest of football, but for the sport as a whole: from next season, Fortuna will be giving away tickets for several matches against its 54,600-seat Merkur- Play Arena for free.
No cheap tickets. No reduced price. Free, for both home and away fans.
“We think it’s completely new,” Alexander Jobst, the club’s CEO, said in an interview on Thursday. “We were trying to think about how we could do the football business completely differently than before.”
The solution he and his colleagues came across, he admitted, may seem a little “disruptive,” to use his word. Long before television and sponsorship, ticket sales were the original pillar of the sports industry.
It also represents a significant portion of Fortuna Düsseldorf’s revenue. The club earns a whopping 8 million euros ($8.8 million) in entry tickets every season it plays in the second division, Jobst said in a conference call on Thursday. The figure, he said, was higher when the team last played in the Bundesliga, in 2020. That revenue accounts for about a fifth of the club’s total revenue.
Under its “new strategic vision,” Jobst said, Fortuna would look to replace that with commercial revenue, as well as increased revenue from merchandise and concessions generated by more visitors than the 29,000 it currently attracts.
It has already signed deals with three partners – worth about $45 million over five years – aiming to introduce free tickets for three games next season. If the club can find more partners, Jobst eventually hopes to be able to expand the plan to every home game. “We are confident that we will have the opportunity to do that,” he said.
The program is unique in a German league system known for its fan-oriented club ownership rules, its low ticket prices and even its ticketing gimmicks. In Berlin, for example, a few years ago a club offered a fan a lifetime subscription if he had the computer code tattooed on his arm.
While weighing options to attract larger crowds, Jobst said Fortuna had considered the more obvious option of simply lowering ticket prices before concluding such a move would be dismissed as merely “trying to fill the stadium”. It had also taken into account the risk that fans would not show up for matches if their tickets were, in a strict economic sense, worthless. But the idea of opening the doors to everyone – ‘Football for everyone’, Jobst called it – won out.
“We want to open up Fortuna Düsseldorf to our fans even more than before,” he said. “We want to give back, to open it up to fans, no matter what their personal price barrier is. Let’s open it up and see what happens.”
He is aware that his club’s precedent could inspire or force other teams to do the same, and he accepts that such an idea is easier to accept in Düsseldorf, a hub for some of Germany’s biggest companies, than elsewhere. That, he said, is why the club believes it will work.
“It suits Düsseldorf,” he said, “and it suits Fortuna.”