ON MAY 8th the sold-out Red Bull Arena, an old communist stadium with a new roof and a new name, rejoiced at the triumph of German football’s boldest corporate experiment. RB Leipzig, a team owned by Red Bull, an Austrian fizzy-drink maker, beat Karlsruhe SC to win promotion to the Bundesliga, Germany’s premier league. For Leipzig, the only sour note came when the coach suffered a hamstring injury trying to escape a Bierdusche (beer shower) from his players. But in the rest of Germany, many fret that the team is sabotaging traditional Fussballkultur.
Germany has so far avoided the worst excesses of modern football. Tickets are cheap, and clubs have to be majority-owned by their fans. But RB Leipzig bucks the model. Red Bull bought the team, then a small town side, in 2009. Barred from renaming it after its product, it altered the colours to resemble the Red Bull logo and renamed it “RasenBallsport [literally, “lawn ball sports”] Leipzig”. To circumvent fan ownership, it arbitrarily rejects membership applications: whereas Bayern Münich has 270,000 members, RB Leipzig has only 636.
Red Bull’s cash has allowed the club to buy talent and rise through four divisions in seven years. This has outraged fans across Germany. RB Leipzig’s first competitive game ended with the team bus fleeing an angry mob. The stadium is boycotted by other teams’ fans. Before last year’s away match at Karlsruhe SC, anonymous letters were sent to RB Leipzig fans’ homes warning them to stay at home. “What is being done (by RB Leipzig) makes me want to throw up,” a rival coach recently told journalists.

INTERACTIVE: Footballing pay and performance
Leipzigers do not care. Red Bull has brought elite football back to a parched region. East German clubs were crushed by reunification: unable to compete, they slipped down the divisions. RB Leipzig will be the first eastern club to play in the Bundesliga since 2009. Of Germany’s 23-man World Cup squad in 2014, only Toni Kroos, a midfielder, was not born in the West. “In no other sector of society is the East so discriminated against,” wrote Die Zeit, a newspaper.
RB Leipzig’s rise mirrors that of Leipzig itself, Germany’s fastest-growing city. Known as “Hypezig”, it has a reputation as a cheaper, edgier Berlin. The club boosts the city as well as Red Bull.
Other German clubs are hardly free of corporate influence. Schalke 04’s shirts boast Gazprom’s logo; Volkswagen pumps money into VfL Wolfsburg. Some commentators wonder whether more corporate cash might make the Bundesliga more fun to watch: this year Bayern Münich cantered to their fourth straight first-division title. But most Germans still prefer their flat, egalitarian meritocracy over bubbly, caffeinated commercialism.