When the Bundesliga was founded in 1963, Eintracht Frankfurt was a charter member. The first year, they finished third. But over time, that 1960 European Cup proved to be an inflection point. Real Madrid went on to dominate Europe. Eintracht? It hasn’t even won the Bundesliga. “And yet,” says Jurgen Klinsmann, the former German international, “they enjoy a huge level of identity with the people. That makes them accountable. It makes them work harder. They’re a big club, the biggest club in a very important region.”
What makes a big club? The term is used throughout football indiscriminately. Some clubs are big because they have had historic success, even if that was decades ago. Others sell millions of shirts, or they have the backing of a billionaire or a national investment fund. Dortmund’s Cramer offers a simpler definition. “The more people you reach, the more hearts you open, that’s a big club,” he says. “Eintracht Frankfurt is able to reach many, many people.”
To take advantage of that, you must remain relevant. At the end of the 1990s and start of the 2000s, Eintracht fell into 2. Bundesliga, Germany’s second division. When it happened again after a disastrous 2011 season, the directors brought in Axel Hellmann. A successful corporate lawyer, Hellmann had been working on the club’s non-profit side, overseeing the business of 19 other sports, from table tennis to darts. He had a vision for restoring Eintracht’s glory. “We needed to improve in the areas of sport, marketing, digitalization and internationalization,” he says. “To close the gap between us and the top clubs in the Bundesliga on every level.”
Simply put, he understood that succeeding on the field meant succeeding off of it. “While others were saying, ‘Can we just play football?’ Axel was sending the message that it didn’t work that way,” says Reschke. “We have to build a big administrative building. We have to run our own stadium. We have to care for our sponsors. We have to celebrate our hundredth birthday with a big party for our supporters. All of that will have an effect.”
Beating Bayern gave Eintracht a foundation. Hellmann has pushed the club’s executives to continue building on it, even during a pandemic. “It continues to drive us on,” he says. “There’s no other club in recent years that has had a similar kind of dynamic development.”
From about 35,000 paying members only a few years ago, it now has more than 100,000. “That can change political structures in a city like Frankfurt,” says Reschke. The surge in membership helped convince the city to approve the construction of the new headquarters, adjacent to Deutsche Bank Park, and then to allow the club to take commercial control of the stadium itself. That, in turn, led to the seven-year, $40 million naming rights deal in 2020.
That first trip to the Europa League, in 2019, ended in a semifinal loss to Chelsea. Last year, everyone connected with the club was determined to see it go even further. “For us,” Hellman said, “the bond of energy between the fans, the local region, the staff and the players is crucial.”
For April’s quarterfinal at Nou Camp, some 30,000 fans traveled from Frankfurt, though only 5,000 tickets had been allotted for them. They marched down Las Ramblas clad all in white and found their way into the game. The noise they made inside led both Xavi Hernandez, Barcelona’s manager, and club president Joan Laporta to complain that it felt like the game was in Frankfurt. Filip Kostic scored twice, Borre added a third, and Eintracht held s 3-0 lead after 90 minutes.
