Once the playoffs comes around, hopefully someone will be willing to explain again how Saarbrucken can reach the next flight. It does appear very likely that they'll at least be in the playoffs. On Thu, Taylor got them a late equalizer, and then they added two more in stoppage time to win 4-2.
It was dealt with a page or two ago IIRC. Six teams go into the play-offs, two from the RL South-West and one each from the other four RLs; after that it's open draw (no seedings) with the ties played over two legs and away goals as the decider. If that doesn't work, it's penalties.
Saarbrucken tied things up, 1-1 on aggregate. Second leg is now in the second half extra time, not sure if Taylor is playing.
Saarbrücken is in the Regionalliga Süd, that's fourth division. He's played three matches and scored one goal.
They get paid pretty good money in the regionalliga, but it is considered amateur by German standards.
Any estimates? Its interesting because I believe England has 4 divisions of professional players but France/Italy has 2. I believe their 3rd division is semi-pro. And I thought Germany was the same.
€30k to over €100k. Obviously depends on the club and the circumstances. A few years back a Regionalliga club offered €150k for a striker.
That's a very high estimate. A very few Regionalliga teams are professional, including Saarbrücken. But that's really the exception. Many clubs are indeed amateur, so players are either students or earn more in their day jobs. Foreign players (who came to Germany just to play football) will probably earn a bit more than than usual, as they have to rely on their income from football. Earlier this year, there was quite a bit of panic among Regionalliga clubs that the German minimum wage (8,5 Euros/hour) could be applied to football players (ultimately it wasn't). Some articles: Goslarer SC announced they will not do practice sessions anymore, since if they had to pay players per hour they couldn't afford to anymore: http://www.ndr.de/sport/fussball/re...t-Goslarer-Fussballer-aus,mindestlohn310.html (article also mentions that at Goslar players earn between 200 and 450 Euros per month) General article on the minimum wage in German football: http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.d...eurverein.1001.de.html?dram:article_id=316544 (article also mentions that the average salary for a regular starter in the Regionalligas is about 24,000 Euros/year).
To people whose football template is the UK, the German 4th division is a strange beast. I'll take your word for it that there are purely amateur teams, i.e. the entire squad get expense allowances (200-500 Euros per month for their food and auto costs), but there have always been amateur and semi-pro players even in Germany's D3. In fact, Fabian Boll was playing in BL1 for St. Pauli while holding down a day job as a police detective. In England, by contrast, about 40% of the D5 Conference sides are full-time. Even in League 2, part-timers are rare, with most of those planning to transition to "civilian" life within 18 months. As I understand it, the result of is that the promotion challenging top third in most RLs are recognizably full-time, with players coming from all over and about 85% of the squad earning 30k Euros per year and up. Meanwhile the bottom third's players come from commuting distance within the region. The gap in standard is said to be pretty huge.
The German 3rd division has only officially been professional since 2008, so before it was amateur as well. Now, amateur in Germany means more something along the lines of Non-League in the UK. Players can still be payed, but it isn't required. Teams that are officially professional (the top three divisions since 2008) do have to have a certain amount of full-time players, theoretically they can still have some amateur players as well (especially youth players often don't make a living wage, unless they are, say, top talents at Bayern or so). Amateur football has long been highly valued in Germany (until 1963 professionalism was outright banned by the German FA). That teams in the 3rd division ahdn below have professionalized in the last 20 or 30 years is something that has kind of creeped in, simply because those teams that had ambitions to play in the nationwide leagues had to start to professionalize to keep up. In the early 90s the 3rd division still had 10+ regional divisions, so the gap between those teams that aimed for promotion to the 2. Bundesliga and those at the bottom of their leagues (who maybe barely were among the 300 best teams in Germany or so...) was huge. The current system is the result of the German FA trying to allow some teams to professionalize, while still staying true to the ideal of amateur football.
Having sent a few players over to the regionalliga in the past - say 2005-2014, those are the numbers we were dealing with. Knew a player in the Landesliga making €600 just last year while he was a student. Also knew of a player making €65,000 per year last year in the regionalliga. Minimum was €2,200 per month unless you were a student.
Thanks for posting. Its just incredible. Why was it taken so long to professionalize the 3 Bundesliga? Any relevant reasons?
Foreigners (and veteran pros) will get more payed more in the first place, since they wouldn't come to play for free anyway (unlike the local guys with a day job with no ambition to turn pro). From the 4th division on, what a club can pay depends mostly on their sponsors (since there is no TV income in the Regionalliga, and half of the teams have attendance averages about 500 or below - you can't compare the pre-2008 3rd division RL to the current one because of this). De facto at many amateur clubs the sponsor (often a local business man who does this as a hobby) is paying the players directly and functions more like a team owner in the US. What a club can pay doesn't really depend on their level due to this - its not uncommon that players move from the 4th or 5th division to the 6th or 7th for better pay. It just depends on how much the sponsor of a club is willing to throw around (Aílton playing in the German 6th division is a prime example). Some 6th or 7th division clubs pay quite well, but lack infrastructure to play any higher. Here in Braunschweig, we recently had club in the 7th division who hired some Cuban internationals and ex-pros from Eintracht Braunschweig, financed by the president who's also the owner of a local company. Another historical example was Harlekin Augsburg in the 80s, a club founded by a guy who had made his fortune with amusement arcades. He hired some recently retired Bundesliga players, manager Armin Veh and Brazilian former international Marinho Chargas to play in the 8th division.
Since I found an article on Harlekin Augsburg yesterday after I had posted here is a supplement: In 1986, the club signed 2. Bundesliga striker Engelbert Buschmann (http://www.kicker.de/news/fussball/...n-5627/52040/spieler_engelbert-buschmann.html). In the 8th division, his salary was roughly twice as much a he had earned in the 2. Bundesliga before. http://www.11freunde.de/artikel/groessenwahn-der-kreisliga-die-harlekin-globetrotters
You must keep in mind though that players weren't making all that much in the first place. He went from 1700 to 3000 DM per month, according to the article. So, adjusted for inflation, this should be about a middle class income.