Watch for free: Fortuna Düsseldorf is waiving admission for fans in three games.
Image: obs
Why should people have a permanent interest in football in their own city? Hopefully Düsseldorf’s plan to let them into the stadium free of charge will start a discussion that is overdue.
In the city of Düsseldorf, which is currently home to more than 650,000 people, there is a stadium that can accommodate 54,600 people – and in which an average of 29,378 people come this season per game of the men’s team. You can interpret it like this even without local knowledge: In Düsseldorf, even football, the favorite sport of the Germans, has to struggle with the consequences of a lack of attention. And because Düsseldorf is not Munich or Dortmund from an information-economic point of view, we would not actually deal with the city and its largest sports club in these weeks, in which the championship is finally exciting again.
Since Wednesday, however, it is conceivable that the most exciting and perhaps even most important questions in German football will not be negotiated in Munich or Dortmund in the next few weeks, but in Düsseldorf. There, Fortuna Düsseldorf, sixth in the Bundesliga, presented its new strategy for the future: Fortuna for everyone. The focus is on the idea that everyone can come to the stadium for free. This should be the case for at least three match days next season. And in the round of introductions, the mayor of the city even said a very big word by football standards: revolution.