The annual Bundesliga Playa Haters’ Ball has commenced within the Bundesliga’s official YouTube channel, and there’s one clear target: the Bundesliga’s newest arrival after promotion, RB Leipzig.
A recent piece on The Guardian by Philip Oltermann entitled “How RB Leipzig became the most hated club in German football” reveals just that: nobody likes the Red Bull-backed sugar babies. It’s a great read, but, essentially, they’re just a commercialized, corporate sack o’ s*** in a division that prides itself on fan ownership and cheap tickets.
Unlike the Red Bulls franchise in New York, cleverly named the New York Red Bulls, German football doesn’t allow clubs to be named after sponsors — as hard as this might be for Americans to understand.
To circumnavigate the rules, Red Bull purchased a fifth-division side, renamed them RB Leipzig ('Rasenballsport Leipzig'), changed their crest and kit and dumped millions of dirty caffeine and taurine laced dollars into the club.
But they weren’t fooling anybody in Germany — we know what that cheeky RB really stands for!
RB Leipzig earned promotion to the Bundesliga this season, and Germany is incensed at this sponsor driven monstrosity blowing to hell all the Bundesliga’s romantic appeal.
Red Bull’s a lifestyle. It demands that you ascend to the edge of space in a pressurized capsule before jumping out. You’ve gotta be on board with wingsuiting, flugtaging and whatever other verbs you can do in the present continuous.
In that sense, you’d think everybody who’s anybody would be down with Red Bull. It’s what the kids are doing. But a trip to the Bundesliga YouTube channel reveals another side, a darker side to Leipzig’s reception.
In a video revealing some of the FIFA player ratings for the RB Leipzig squad, the top comments range from “I don’t like RB Leipzig” to “In 10 years, it’s going to be Coca-Cola United vs. Red Bull Leipzig in the Champions League final.”
In a video titled “Keepy Uppy Challenge - RB Leipzig” (this should be innocent enough!), I will not even begin to transcribe some of the comments. But, some of the more mild top comments include “Leipzig is the corporate cancer of the Bundesliga” and “Hope they get relegated. Ruining football”.
Even a video documenting their captain operating a camera is full of scathing remarks and curses, while the consesus on “Leipzig’s Creative Free-Kick Routine” is that they probably bought the routine from someone else.
With fans boycotting their matches, treating them to 15 minutes of silence, wearing black to demonstrate how they’re killing the game and throwing severed pig’s heads at them, it figures to be a long season for RB Leipzig.
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