On June 11, 1997, Axel Bosse went to the Stadion am Elsterweg and witnessed VfL Wolfsburg’s ascent to the Bundesliga with a 5-4 victory over Mainz 05. Since then he has had a season ticket, now in Block 26 of the VW Arena. More precisely two season tickets, the other is for his son Jan. He was 14 at the time and thus belongs to the first generation that grew up with the Bundesliga club VfL Wolfsburg as a fixed part of fan culture. For 29 years now they have been in the top division, never relegated, that is basically a solid tradition.
But after the 0:1 defeat to Werder Bremen two weeks ago, father and son, along with a few others, went home muttering: “That’s it.” Seventeenth place, two points from the last eight games, and no sign that they might win again. Some said: “That’s it for me.” Others wondered whether they should start attending VfL’s women’s team, which, although not as good as in the past, are still in the Champions League. And Axel Bosse, 74, said to his son: “We’ll go to the 2nd division as well.”
In Berlin, there was at the Deutsches Theater an event about football and politics. Moderator Christoph Biermann announced a clip about the worst escalations of the wonderful sport, to which someone in the audience shouted “Wolfsburg!” It turned out to be Trump and Infantino. This shows how little the restoration-minded traditionalists have managed to reconcile with the club and its circumstances even after almost three decades.
Populists also currently land a safe hit when they wish for VfL’s relegation. “No one outside Wolfsburg sheds a tear for VfL,” said Bild columnist Alfred Draxler – and he is wrong again. Of course people would cry. The morally questionable logic is that fans of Schalke, Dortmund, Cologne, and Hertha are said to show “true love,” while supporters of VfL Wolfsburg are merely a handful of fans with second-rate feelings. Therefore, a relegation would be ethically justified or even necessary.
100 Percent
Now it obviously matters that VfL Wolfsburg Fußball-GmbH is a 100 percent subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, and the rule requiring 50+1 percent of the shares to be owned by the club has been overridden. Officially the club is thus, like Bayer Leverkusen and RB Leipzig, controlled by a conglomerate. But the media buzz about the “mighty VW bosses” is probably very out of touch in this context. Indeed, the VW chairman Oliver Blume and the head of the works council Daniela Cavallo sit on the supervisory board, but its composition has little to do with football expertise.
Above all: VfL never had priority in the VW high-rise at the main plant. Currently the car managers have even more to do, as not much is happening in China and they are fighting Trump’s tariffs in the USA. Although the electric fleet is advancing, Porsche has problems, Audi has problems, according to the FAZ “the image of a company whose complexity is not controllable is hardening.”
In contrast, a top football club is a manageable thing. If you have a handful of good people in the crucial positions, you’ve already achieved a lot. That does not seem to be the case at VfL anymore. They won the championship in 2009, the cup in 2015. For years things have been going downhill, on the table since the departure of coach Oliver Glasner, who led the club to a third and so far last time in the Champions League in 2021. Since then they have recorded seasons 12th, 8th, 12th and 11th.
Above all, the squad was not improved consistently. Pars pro toto stands, uncharitably speaking, the signing of midfielder Lovro Majer, who in 2023 was apparently bought for around 25 million euros and was touted by the then coach Niko Kovac as a kind of younger Luka Modric. Of course, a bit of fantasy is always part of player signings, but the reality remains far from that to this day. Certainly the coach is the decisive personnel in any football club, but coaching appointments and squad composition are the responsibility of the sporting director; that was the Dane Peter Christiansen for a year and a half until his dismissal on March 8. He spoke English and, through the squad composition, ensured that English was spoken with the team. As a result, they felt a bit alien in Wolfsburg.
Danes Do Not Win
Christiansen came from Copenhagen and brought in a number of players, mostly from Denmark, all not bad, but not exactly upgrades, so at some point from Michael Holm’s song “Tears Don’t Lie” and its adaptation by Otto Waalkes (“Danes Don’t Lie”) the slogan became: “Danes Do Not Win.” At the start of the season Christiansen had hired the newcomer Paul Simonis, who in the Netherlands had been successful in his first year as head coach with a small club. Respectable and bold, but hindsight is always 20/20.
Or rather, in this case not, because the already faltering VfL made his inexperienced U19 coach Daniel Bauer the head after his dismissal—and it did not work at all. The points-per-game average of 0.5 was even worse than Simonis’s (0.92). Now the undoubtedly experienced Dieter Hecking is supposed to salvage something, who in 2015 became runner-up and cup winner with VfL. But he should have saved VfL Bochum last year—and Bochum is now in the 2nd division. When Hecking arrived, they first fired the team bus driver as an alleged troublemaker, which, however, was probably not the decisive problem.
The visible problem is football. Since Niko Kovac’s era, largely unattractive to watch, but at least technically well-structured. The former remains, the latter is not. The “wildly assembled squad,” as an insider puts it, is weak in quality at the back, too slow in midfield, and up front lacking a goalscorer. Although in every TV broadcast so-called experts claim the squad is “individually strong,” that is not true either. The idea was to sign highly talented players, with the aim of them acting for the benefit of the team and to sell them at a high price for the budget. Micky van de Ven and Felix Nmecha are two players where that worked. But since then the list of ins and outs reads like a tribute to Felix Magath’s worst times, when half the away stand sat with his not Bundesliga-ready signings.
Danes Do Not Win
Christiansen came from Copenhagen and brought in a number of players, mostly from Denmark, all not bad, but not exactly upgrades, so at some point from Michael Holm’s song “Tears Don’t Lie” and its adaptation by Otto Waalkes (“Danes Don’t Lie”) the slogan became: “Danes Do Not Win.” At the start of the season Christiansen had hired the newcomer Paul Simonis, who in the Netherlands had been successful in his first year as head coach with a small club. Respectable and bold, but hindsight is always 20/20.
Or rather, in this case not, because the already faltering VfL made his inexperienced U19 coach Daniel Bauer the head after his dismissal—and it did not work at all. The points-per-game average of 0.5 was even worse than Simonis’s (0.92). Now the undoubtedly experienced Dieter Hecking is supposed to salvage something, who in 2015 became runner-up and cup winner with VfL. But he should have saved VfL Bochum last year—and Bochum is now in the 2nd division. When Hecking arrived, they first fired the team bus driver as an alleged troublemaker, which, however, was probably not the decisive problem.
The visible problem is football. Since Kovac’s era, largely unattractive to watch, but at least technically well-structured. The former remains, the latter is not. The “wildly assembled squad,” as one insider says, is weak in quality at the back, too slow in midfield, and up front lacking a goalscorer. Although in every TV broadcast so-called experts claim the squad is “individually strong,” that is not true either. The idea was to sign highly talented players, with the aim of them acting for the benefit of the team and to sell them at a high price for the budget. Micky van de Ven and Felix Nmecha are two players where that worked. But since then the list of ins and outs reads like a tribute to Felix Magath’s worst times, when half the away stand sat with his not Bundesliga-ready signings.
“It’s already hard to watch right now,” says Axel Bosse. “We have never felt such apathy.” Now the accusation is often voiced that the players do not identify with VfL and the city of Wolfsburg and “do not fight” on the pitch hard enough. “Effort is non-negotiable,” read on a placard in the North Curve against Bremen. That probably needs to be seen with nuance as well. One could also say that it is primarily a sense of confusion, because the players do not know what to do besides passing the ball back and forth and hoping for set pieces. There are players who genuinely strive to be part of the community in which they temporarily live. But probably more seasoned professionals are needed beyond captain Maximilian Arnold to represent the club in its local roots for many years.
VfL has never quite managed to become a regional club, partly because its location is awkward. On one side is Braunschweig with its own football club, on the other is Saxony-Anhalt. The city of Wolfsburg has about 130,000 inhabitants, but only a small core with the VW plant, the train station, the Autostadt, an outlet, a few museums and the pedestrian zone. Surrounding it are many rural-tinged incorporated districts. One of them is Detmerode, where Axel Bosse lives and is politically active.
Actually he is a cultural politician and has been active for the Greens for many years. He is now the local mayor, “because the CDU and SPD had had enough.” Bosse has of course spent his professional life at VW as well.
Detmerode stands for the inseparable history of VW and Wolfsburg, which grew in the 1960s through the boom of the VW Beetle and the influx of VW employees to up to 15,000 inhabitants. Today only about half live there; the children have long since left home and often only a widow remains in each house or apartment. This shouldn’t sound like doom; Wolfsburg is still comparatively wealthy, VW retirees are generally well provided for.
But optimism for the future is not widespread either. “The state of confusion at VfL aligns with the state of confusion across the entire city,” says Bosse. “No one really knows how to proceed.”
The older generation feels reminded of the early 1990s, when things looked pretty bleak. Back then Peter Hartz’s four-day week prevented mass layoffs, and proper structural reforms and better cars pushed the company, the city, and the mood forward. A similar development is not foreseeable today, which is why the football misery indeed and rightly plays only a secondary role. At the same time, it is not as if one could establish a real link between the loss of perhaps 50,000 jobs across the group brands and the subsidies to VfL. Naturally a populist medium like Bild will construct that, but former chairman Martin Winterkorn had anchored football quite deeply at VW, and the alleged subsidies of around 70 to 80 million euros are peanuts compared with other expenditures.
So it would continue in the 2nd division as well, presumably with less money, fewer spectators, and a budget geared toward returning to the Bundesliga as quickly as possible. But it is not time yet. Axel Bosse has checked the remaining schedule. On the last matchday of the season they have to face FC St. Pauli, who currently sit three points ahead of the relegation playoff place; if they win there, it could be that they finish 16th and then manage to save themselves from relegation for a third time via the playoff. When you see the team play, there is nothing to suggest they will, and Bosse agrees. But, he says: “We still always hope.”
