Volkswagen’s Football Retreat Could Cost Audi €300m. BYD Is Buying the Audience.

The court case Volkswagen now has to explain

A 2024 judgment from the Landgericht München I provides the most important public evidence yet on the economics of Audi’s Bayern shares. The case arose from the squeeze-out of Audi’s former minority shareholders and required the court to consider the value of assets outside Audi’s core automotive operations. One of them was the Bayern stake.

For the valuation date of 31 July 2020, the court accepted the holding at €90 million. The reason matters more than the number. According to the judgment, Audi’s shares were linked to its sponsorship relationship with Bayern, Audi could not freely dispose of them and, even in the event of a sale, could not retain a price above its acquisition cost. Elsewhere in the reasoning, the court put the economic consequence plainly: Audi could not participate in a possible market value of FC Bayern.

The underlying contract is not public. The judgment does not tell us whether the mechanism is a call option, a repurchase right, a transfer restriction, an entitlement to excess proceeds or a combination of several provisions. It also does not establish that the same terms remain unchanged in September 2026. The court was valuing Audi at a 2020 date, not writing a current prospectus for the Bayern shares.

That caveat does not make the finding unimportant. It makes the question more precise. If the historic restriction still applies, Volkswagen is not deciding whether to sell a €416 million asset and collect the money. It may be deciding whether Audi should surrender an investment whose apparent market value has risen by more than €300 million without being entitled to keep most of that increase.

That is not necessarily an accounting loss. It is potentially a very large piece of foregone value.

There had already been clues that Bayern’s industrial shareholders were never given ordinary, freely tradable equity. In a 2021 OMR interview, Uli Hoeneß discussed a repurchase right in the context of the adidas holding. That does not prove Audi has an identical clause, but it fits the structure described three years later in the Audi valuation case: strategic partners were allowed into Bayern, while Bayern retained unusually strong control over what could happen to those shares.

A political portfolio decision, not just a financial one

Volkswagen has every reason to simplify. The group is restructuring at a scale measured in tens of billions of euros, cutting investment, reducing complexity and asking businesses and holdings to prove their strategic relevance. The official portfolio review says assets should be tested for operational necessity, future strategic necessity, regulatory reasons and financial logic, with value-maximising alternatives considered where those tests fail.

Football, however, appears to have been given a category-level answer before that case-by-case exercise is finished.

That matters because Volkswagen is not governed like an ordinary listed company with a small board and a dispersed shareholder base. Its supervisory board is split evenly between shareholder and employee representatives. Lower Saxony appoints two shareholder representatives. IG Metall and the works council described the 3 September Future Plan agreement as a compromise in which the employee side and the state had taken responsibility alongside management.

None of that proves who inserted the football wording or why. There is no public evidence that the works council, IG Metall or Lower Saxony demanded an exit from Bayern, Stuttgart or any other club. It does show why describing the football decision as a simple portfolio-manager’s conclusion is too neat. Future Plan 2030 is a negotiated industrial and political settlement, reached while Volkswagen is cutting jobs and trying to demonstrate that non-core spending is being challenged.

Football is an easy symbol in that environment. A shareholding in Bayern is easier to attack publicly than another line in a corporate structure few employees will ever see. The problem is that symbolism and value creation are not the same thing.

CORRECTIV reported in July that Volkswagen was examining the Audi stake in Bayern and Porsche’s 10.41% holding in VfB Stuttgart. At that stage, Wolfsburg and Audi’s locally rooted position in Ingolstadt were expected to be treated differently because of their social and regional significance. No disposal has been announced.

The Bayern case now shows why a blanket direction can be economically clumsy. If Audi’s upside is contractually restricted, an exit may realise little more than the original €90 million while handing control of a stake with a notional market value above €400 million back into Bayern’s shareholder system.

Viessmann makes the timing more interesting

That brings the reported Viessmann deal into a different light.

Bayern does not appear to need €250 million to repair its balance sheet. Its latest published figures show a club with close to €1 billion in group turnover, strong EBITDA and substantial current assets. When SportsGlare first analysed the proposed Viessmann investment, the obvious question was why Bayern would sell the final 5% available under its political 70/30 settlement with members when it was already financially strong.

The Audi situation adds another possible answer, although there is no evidence that it is the purpose of the Viessmann transaction.

If Viessmann acquires 5% from FC Bayern München e.V. as reported, the parent association would move from 75% to 70%. If the e.V. later had the opportunity to reacquire Audi’s 8.33%, it would rise to 78.33%, leaving outside shareholders with 21.67%. Bayern would have reopened another 8.33 percentage points of room below its self-imposed 30% external-ownership ceiling.

The cash arithmetic is just as striking. A reported €250 million Viessmann sale would be more than enough to fund a repurchase around Audi’s historic €90 million acquisition cost, if that remains the relevant contractual level and if the e.V. is the buyer. Roughly €160 million would remain.

There is no public evidence that Bayern is executing that sequence. The Viessmann deal itself is still reported rather than formally reflected in Bayern’s shareholder page, and the current Audi contract has not been disclosed. But Volkswagen’s new football policy has turned what looked like a simple 5% capital raise into a much more interesting shareholder question. Bayern may be preparing to add Viessmann at the same time that one of its three long-standing industrial shareholders is being told by its parent group to reconsider whether it should be there at all.

The other Volkswagen clubs are not the same trade

Volkswagen’s football exposure extends beyond Bayern. Porsche owns 10.41% of VfB Stuttgart 1893 AG. Audi has a minority position in FC Ingolstadt 04’s football company. Volkswagen owns VfL Wolfsburg’s operating company outright.

Those assets should not be treated as interchangeable. Porsche’s Stuttgart investment is recent and sits inside a broader sponsorship and regional relationship. Ingolstadt is tied to Audi’s home city. Wolfsburg is embedded in the economic and social structure of a company town and cannot sensibly be reduced to a passive investment line.

The original logic of Volkswagen’s review recognised some of those differences. The reported Future Plan wording now risks flattening them again by treating football equity itself as the problem.

Bayern is the cleanest example of why that can be a mistake. The stake costs Audi no rescue funding, carries one of the strongest commercial associations in European sport and may contain contractual economics that make an exit substantially less valuable to Audi than the stake appears to be worth to Bayern.

China is not waiting for Germany to make up its mind

The strategic problem goes beyond the shares.

Volkswagen is reconsidering football exposure at the same time that Chinese carmakers are using the sport to solve one of the hardest problems in the European automotive market: becoming familiar enough to be trusted with a purchase that can cost tens of thousands of euros.

BYD’s UEFA EURO 2024 partnership was a good example of what that strategy looks like in practice. UEFA said the activation included tournament visibility, fan-zone displays and hundreds of events across more than 230 BYD stores in 19 European countries. Football was connected directly to a retail network.

BYD has since gone further. In 2026 it became Manchester City’s official automotive partner, with training-wear visibility, vehicle provision and energy technology integrated into the club relationship. It also agreed a global automotive partnership with Paris Saint-Germain through June 2029. BYD itself describes football as part of an international strategy to increase awareness of its brand, vehicles and technology.

Chery is following the same route, including a three-season automotive partnership with AFC Bournemouth. The point is not that BYD or Chery is preparing to buy Bayern, Stuttgart or Wolfsburg. There is no evidence of that.

They do not need to.

The valuable asset is the audience, the association and the repetition. European football can make an unfamiliar automotive brand look less unfamiliar every weekend. It can connect a national campaign to dealers, hospitality, fleets, content and local communities. For a challenger trying to enter a mature market, that has obvious value.

Volkswagen knows this because it continues to buy football rights itself. Its DFB partnership runs to 2028, and the group remains active in football sponsorship elsewhere. The company has therefore not concluded that football is ineffective. It is considering whether ownership belongs on the balance sheet while competitors are demonstrating how aggressively they value the same cultural space.

That distinction is defensible if each asset is judged on its economics. It becomes much harder to defend if football equity is discarded mainly because it is politically awkward during a restructuring.

Audi’s Bayern stake is the test. At the valuation implied by Viessmann, the shares appear to have gained more than €300 million in value since Audi entered. A Munich court found that Audi could not freely capture that gain under the contractual structure it examined. Volkswagen is now contemplating an exit anyway.

The expensive part of Volkswagen’s football retreat may therefore not be what it sells. It may be the value it cannot take with it, and the audience it leaves behind.