After all of the hullabaloo, who here still thinks soccer/futbol is an absolute bore?

Is football coming home?

Keir Starmer: “It looks like it!”

German football club Fortuna Düsseldorf is extending its revolutionary free tickets scheme into a second season and expanding the offer to four home games, the club announced on Thursday.

Second-division outfit Düsseldorf unveiled their "Fortuna for All" project ahead of the 2023/24 campaign in which they gave away tickets for three home games free of charge.

The plan was to compensate for lost ticketing revenue by convincing prominent local businesses to back the socially inclusive scheme as new club sponsors.

At the same time, the club hoped to increase attendance at its MERKUR Spiel Arena, which hosted five matches at this summer's European Championships but is rarely sold out for Düsseldorf home games.

Although Fortuna ultimately missed out on promotion to the top-flight Bundesliga in a dramatic play-off penalty shootout, the club has concluded that the first season of "Fortuna for All" was a success.
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'Fortuna for All' sees overall ticket revenues increase
Fortuna revealed that they received 350,000 ticket requests for the three free home games against Kaiserslautern in October (a dramatic 3-3 draw), Hamburg-based St. Pauli in January (a 1-2 defeat) and Eintracht Braunschweig in April (a 2-0 win) – over five times the usual demand.

And despite earning no revenue from ticket sales for three home matches, the club reported that overall ticketing revenue for the whole season increased by 28%.

Membership of the entirely member-controlled club reportedly increased by a record 20% to over 33,000, while ticket sales for the coming 2024/45 season were up 19%.

One concern attached to offering tickets free of charge was the potential for "no-shows" given the lack of monetary value attached to a ticker, but the club said the average "no-show rate" was lower than for normal games.

According to a survey conducted by the club among its members, 70% thought "Fortuna for all" had gone well and only 9% were unhappy with it. "Our goal is to convince that 9%," said Chairman Jobst.

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Rheinmetall's role as a leading player in the arms manufacturing industry is seen as highly controversial among sections of Borussia Dortmund's 200,000 members and wider fanbase.

At November's annual general meeting, 556 of 855 members present voted against the deal in a non-binding vote. There were 247 votes in favour, with 52 abstentions.
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In November 2022, the club drew up and published a code of ethics in which it committed itself to "a society without racism, antisemitism, homophobia, sexism, violence and discrimination."

Particularly the penultimate point led to criticism from some quarters given the prominent role of Rheinmetall in German arms exports, not only in the modern day but also historically during the Second World War.

"Such a company wants to be mentioned not only in the context of weapons which injure and kill people, but also with more positive things," Mathias John, Amnesty Germany's arms industry expert, told DW. "Football and sport are positive topics. People associate them with happiness and fair competition, and Rheinmetall wants a piece of that."

Dortmund's most prominent German-speaking fan blog, schwartzgelb.de, criticized the club for both its reasoning behind the deal and the timing of its announcement.

"Just be honest. Say Rheinmetall wants to improve its image and BVB wants the money, and that you have decided the company corresponds to the club’s values," the website wrote. "But save us the statesman-like chatter."

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Reuters news agency quotes the government as saying that around 56 people have been killed.

Local media said police had used tear gas after supporters of the visiting team, Labé, threw stones towards the pitch in anger at the referee.

"It all started with a contested decision by the referee. Then fans invaded the pitch," one witness told AFP.
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The tournament will be leveraged for the glorification of a leader to a degree not seen since Benito Mussolini dominated the 1934 World Cup in Italy

wo men held a press event in the Oval Office last week to announce a taskforce that would work to resolve the logistical problems surrounding the 2026 World Cup in North America, which were largely created by one of them.

Both men were in their element. One, Donald Trump, received toady genuflection and a large, golden … thing (actually the Club World Cup trophy). The other, Fifa president Gianni Infantino, occasioned to bask in the proximity to real power, was affectionately referred to as “The king of soccer, I guess, in a certain way” by Trump.

Theirs may be a marriage of convenience, but it seems to be a very happy one.

At the event, Infantino made unsourced claims of an economic impact of $40bn and the creation of 200,000 jobs, all delivered by the 2025 Club World Cup and the subsequent World Cup proper. Trump demonstratively signed a piece of paper that made the World Cup taskforce official.

The whole thing felt little more than symbolic. Such a taskforce doesn’t require a presidential decree, for a start. But also because Infantino knows full well, as did everyone else in the room, that the president is unlikely to rouse himself for a cause he seems to barely understand.

“Can the US win?” Trump asked at one point, interrupting Infantino, who ignored the question.

“First time it’s ever been in this part of the world,” proclaimed Trump, apparently referring to the World Cup. Never mind that three men’s World Cups have already been staged in North America – in Mexico in 1970 and 1986, and in 1994 in the United States.

Infantino proceeded to theatrically show Trump the new Fifa Club World Cup trophy, a gaudy, golden behemoth that unlocks some rings orbiting its center with a key, which seemed to impress the president. Then the Swiss handed Trump an official match ball with the latter’s signature printed on it, tickling the last of the president’s erogenous zones that had not yet been activated.

By the time he was done, Infantino had fully draped the tournament around one of his favorite strongmen. If it wasn’t already obvious, the 23rd edition of the Fifa World Cup will be remembered as The Donald Trump World Cup (trademark pending). Just as other mega-events have been hijacked for political ends, this World Cup will be leveraged for the glorification of a leader to a degree not seen since Benito Mussolini dominated the 1934 World Cup in Italy or the Videla regime’s stage crafting of the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. While a quarter of the matches will be hosted by Canada and Mexico – introducing a separate set of issues owing to Trump’s erratic saber-rattling with his neighbors – the dominant narrative of the tournament has seemingly already been set.

“When we made this,” Trump said of the 2026 World Cup, “it was made during my first term, and it was so sad, because I said, ‘Can you imagine, I’m not going to be president? And that’s too bad.’ And what happened is they rigged the election, and I became president and so that was a good thing.” Presumably, he was referring to the 2020 election, which he lost with no evidence of rigging, and his subsequent re-election in 2024.

It always seemed unlikely that the sport would be able to keep Trump from claiming soccer’s signature tournament as his own. But Infantino has seen to it that something like the opposite is accomplished instead. The Fifa president, the proud holder of the Russian Federation’s Order of Friendship medal, has written a type of playbook on cozying up to autocrats – or democratically elected heads of state with autocratic inclinations – and entering into mutually beneficial bargains with them. They are lent the World Cup for whatever stains they need to sportswash away and handed a place of prominence at the tournament’s key moments, and Infantino is given a pliant environment from which to source the profits that will keep his patronage machine humming.

That same week, Fifa also announced that the World Cup final will be interrupted by a half-time show for the first time in its history. As well as casting its lot with a historically unpopular US president, Fifa will also indulge in all the worst impulses of American sports.

The 2026 edition of the world’s biggest sporting event, which somehow retains its prestige and credibility despite the best efforts of its guardians over the last century, will already count more teams and more games than any before it. The notion of expanding from 48 to 64 teams for the 2030 edition has already been soft-launched at the Fifa council.

More, more, more, until every last inch and second and ounce of the World Cup has been commercialized and monetized. This is what the full Infantino-ing of Fifa looks like, mirroring the Trump-ification of the next World Cup co-hosts. Each grifting as hard as they possibly can.

After the Oval Office event, Infantino made another appearance with Trump, at a White House crypto summit. Infantino demonstrated his labor-intensive trophy again. And then he cut to the chase. “Fifa is very, very interested to develop a Fifa coin,” he told the roundtable of crypto people. “If there is anyone here who is interested to team up with Fifa, here we are.”

Of course they are.