Bayern’s €250m Viessmann Deal Puts a Price on 50+1

The last five per cent

The proposed buyer is not Viessmann Climate Solutions, Bayern’s existing sponsor. It is Max Viessmann’s family investment vehicle, Viessmann Generations Group. Viessmann Climate Solutions has been connected to Bayern since 2018 and has a global partnership through to 2029. Max Viessmann joined Bayern’s Verwaltungsbeirat, its administrative advisory board, in February.

This is more than an investor arriving with a cheque. The Generations Group is moving from commercial proximity to ownership, backed by the 2023 sale of Viessmann’s climate-solutions business to Carrier.

The deal is also possible only because of a small but consequential decision at Bayern’s 2021 annual meeting. A member motion to lock the e.V. permanently at 75% of the AG failed to secure the required three-quarter majority. Bayern therefore retained the ability to sell the remaining 5% without a member vote. Uli Hoeneß subsequently described the political settlement plainly: the club has an understanding with its members that it will not sell more than 30%. The reported transaction would take the e.V. from 75% to 70%.

The stake is the final invitation into Bayern’s shareholder group, beside adidas, Audi and Allianz, before a further sale would require a much bigger constitutional argument.

It may also be part of a wider commercial succession plan. Reports say Viessmann is expected to move from platinum partner to main partner, the tier occupied by Telekom, adidas, Audi and Allianz. That does not mean the front of shirt is changing tomorrow. Telekom has only just extended on terms reported at up to €65 million a year after Bayern used Emirates’ interest to sharpen the negotiation.

But it does give Bayern another genuinely heavyweight partner at the top table. By 2032, when the Telekom deal is due to end, Viessmann will not be an unfamiliar sponsor asking for a larger role. It will be a shareholder. For Bayern, that is a far better position from which to run the next commercial auction.

For Hoeneß, this could become one of the defining financial legacies of his time at Bayern: 30% held by four German industrial partners, 70% retained by the members’ club, with €250 million added at the point of maximum financial strength. It leaves the club with a shareholder structure and financial strength few European peers can match.

Bayern’s 50+1 discount

The reported price places Bayern at 5.1 times its €978.3 million turnover. That is a serious valuation for a club with recurrent Champions League relevance, a powerful stadium business and global commercial income.

The six comparison deals average roughly 5.6 times revenue. Bayern’s 5.1x is below that. The figures are not like for like, most obviously because Viessmann is buying only 5% and no control. But that is the point. 50+1 does not just obstruct a recovery plan at Schalke or Hamburg. It also limits the price even Bayern can command for its equity.

Liverpool is the closest minority reference. Fenway Sports Group has confirmed that it is selling a minority stake while retaining majority ownership and operational control. The club did not disclose the price or stake. The Guardian reports £1.65 billion for 30%, valuing Liverpool at £5.5 billion, and says Amit Bhatia will join the board as vice-chairman. Bezos has invested through K5 Sports, one member of Bhatia’s 1892 Holdings consortium. He has not bought Liverpool himself.

Real Madrid belongs at €10 billion, the number Florentino Pérez has put on the club as he explores a small outside sale. Bayern may be about to establish a price at half that level.

Atlético shows the other end of the market. The majority sale to Apollo has been reported at €2.1 billion. Apollo owns 57%, while Miguel Ángel Gil and Enrique Cerezo remain involved, and the deal arrives alongside plans for the wider Ciudad del Deporte development. Bayern is selling access. Atlético sold control. Both are sophisticated deals, but they are buying and selling fundamentally different things.

Germany’s old clubs have lost their route back

The rule is not a universal 30% cap on outside equity. Bayern’s 30% ceiling is its own member settlement. The DFL rule requires the parent club to retain a majority of voting rights in the professional company. In principle, an investor can take a larger economic stake without taking the vote.

That arrangement works beautifully when the asset is Bayern. There are buyers willing to pay a premium to be a passenger on one of football’s safest, most successful commercial vehicles.

It works very differently for a club trying to climb back from a bad decade. A would-be investor is not just being asked to provide capital. They are being told that the capital will not bring a clear route to control, an accountable operating mandate or an eventual exit. The investor can have exposure, but not a credible chance to rebuild the business in the way a majority owner can at Liverpool or Atlético.

That is why 50+1 is no longer merely a question of values. It is a question of capital architecture.

Germany’s traditional clubs have not disappeared because they lack supporters, history or football cities. Schalke, Hamburg and Kaiserslautern remain huge names with huge constituencies. They have lost ground because, once a club falls behind, the current system gives it too few ways to change its commercial trajectory quickly and credibly.

Schalke is the clearest case. The club generated €158 million of turnover in 2024/25, remarkable for a second-division side. Yet its annual report also recorded €148 million of liabilities and negative group equity of €99 million. Its financial priority is to refinance bonds and reduce the burden, not to use capital to build the next great German club. The same €250 million that Bayern can raise by selling 5% would clear Schalke’s reported liabilities and still leave more than €100 million to invest.

That does not mean a mystery investor should be allowed to buy Schalke unchecked. It means the present model has produced an ugly asymmetry. Bayern can sell a tiny, non-controlling holding because capital is competing to get in. Schalke’s route to financial breathing space is borrowing, refinancing and waiting. Hamburg and Kaiserslautern recognise the same wider problem: rich in heritage and demand, poor in mechanisms that turn that heritage into patient growth capital.

There are exceptions. Borussia Dortmund’s stock-market listing gives it a capital-market route that most German clubs do not have. RB Leipzig was bought in the fifth division and built from scratch with corporate backing. Bayern has its industrial shareholders. None is a route that Schalke, Hamburg or Kaiserslautern can simply copy after years of decline.

That is how a rule designed to preserve supporter power ends up protecting incumbency. It freezes the hierarchy between the few clubs that already have a credible capital story and the many that need one.

The Federal Cartel Office’s conclusion this week makes the current settlement look less morally neat than its supporters pretend. The authority found no fundamental competition-law objection to 50+1. It also said the rule must be applied consistently if it is to remain legally secure. Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg have long-standing exemptions. RB Leipzig and Hannover 96 present different governance questions. A system with that many special cases cannot keep posing as a simple line between virtue and vice.

Keep the fans. Change the rule.

The case for reform is not to throw open the door to every leveraged fund or absentee owner. It is to stop confusing ownership of the vote with protection of the club.

Ajax offers a useful starting point. Its listed company has a special share, the bijzonder aandeel, whose holder must approve changes to the club’s trading name, core activities, logo, colours, home kit and stadium location in Amsterdam. Germany does not need to copy Ajax line by line. It needs the underlying idea.

Give every members’ association one limited golden share. The share should have an unwaivable veto only over a change to the club’s name, crest, colours or permanent move outside its home city or agreed metropolitan area. An owner could build a new stadium, invest in the academy, appoint a coach, sell players, reshape the commercial operation and run the football business. But they could not turn Schalke into something else or move Kaiserslautern out of the Palatinate.

Outside those identity rights, Germany should allow a genuine route to control or shared-governance capital, subject to a proper fit-and-proper-owner test, source-of-funds disclosure and ongoing DFL oversight. That gives an investor the operational mandate to make a serious long-term bet, while giving supporters protection where it actually matters.

That is a better defence against bad owners than pretending bad debt is somehow more authentic than good equity.

Bayern’s reported €5 billion price is not proof that 50+1 has made German football strong. It shows that Bayern is strong enough to make a restricted stake valuable, even at a lower multiple than this comparison set.

The next question is whether German football wants to preserve that privilege for the clubs already at the top, or give Schalke, Hamburg, Kaiserslautern and the rest a real route back into the economic race.