World Cup flop, campus, tax office
Crisis-plagued DFB ends 2022 with a loss of millions
December 8, 2023, 3:33 p.m
The German Football Association is not doing well financially. The year 2022 will bring red numbers. The association needs a successful national team. If the 2024 European Championship goes wrong, the DFB will face new and probably even bigger problems.
The German Football Association shows a loss of 4.2 million euros in its financial report for 2022. The DFB announced this on Friday. The “Handelsblatt” had previously reported on it. The DFB justified the deficit with the national team’s sporting failures, the construction costs and the ongoing expenses for the campus, which cost almost 190 million euros, as well as the disputes with the tax office. Accordingly, special circumstances resulting from the withdrawal of non-profit status for the years 2006 as well as 2014 and 2015 are affecting the balance sheet.
Without special effects, the loss would have been 17.5 million euros, writes the “Handelsblatt”. However, a liquidated pension fund brought in 9.5 million euros. The free reserve, which is important in the balance sheet, has fallen to just 41 million euros.
“Overall, it is still an acceptable economic result, considering that the national team was eliminated in the preliminary round of the World Cup in Qatar and that we are now dealing with a structural deficit,” DFB finance director Stephan Grunwald was quoted as saying by the newspaper. The association “continues to face major challenges” and will “consistently continue on the path it has chosen,” he added in an association statement.
Economically, the DFB is dependent on the performance of the men’s national team. If next year’s European Championships in front of our own audience are also disappointing, “we will have a more serious problem,” said Grunewald. The non-profit association has leased the rights to the national team, the DFB Cup and individual DFB leagues to the subsidiary DFB GmbH & Co. KG. In the first year of 2022, this came to a profit of 23 million euros with sales of 377 million euros. According to its own information, the DFB eV expects a balanced result for 2023.