If you are looking for me, I'm the guy in the fetal position lying in the corner. Another English writer praising the German model without ********ing knowing a thing about it.
Now that my anger has mellowed (bah, who am I kidding?) At least a short comment. There are again small mistakes that show a lack of research (no, Wolfsburg and Leverk(e)usen have not "always been owned by corporations", the 50+1 rule was not introduced " in 2001 when the 36 clubs in the two divisions of the Bundesliga broke away from the DFB" [it was introduced in 1999, two years before the DFL was founded, and was a reaction to Bayer and VW becoming the owners of the football sections of two BL clubs - of course this won't make sense to anyone not knowing those clubs haven't "always been owned by corporations"). Those might not be huge mistakes in the grand scheme of things, but if you can't be bothered to get this right maybe you shouldn't try to lecture people on this stuff. But then there is the very fundamental stuff... making no distinction between clubs and companies (BVB, your shinning example, are a freaking publicly traded company), throwing arround phrases like fan-owned clubs or fan-controlled clubs (which are both either factually wrong or highly misleading), buying into the DFL's PR speek without bothering to research how this works in practice... not mentioning how toothless the 50+1 rule really is (see: Hoffenheim, Leipzig - and the majority of 1860's football section now is even owned by one of these dreaded foreign investors. He might not have total control of the club yet, but he sure is trying). I won't go through in detail (even a throw away paragraph like the one on amateur clubs offers a lot to comment on...), there's only so many times a man can deal with having to write the same shit again and again.
Well I give the author credit for speaking English and actually acknowledging that the Bundesliga exists! If you got all of your soccer info from Fox Soccer Channel or "Soccer by Ives" you would never know Germany has a league.
I don't get your anger. Sure there are mistakes but it is not an academic paper. It is an article in a newspaper, written for the general public. Going too deep would be a mistake. A lot of the mistakes you point out are more on the formal side. Yes, Bayer and VW didn't own the clubs before but they utterly controlled them. Both clubs had a very different business plan compared to the rest of the league long before the 50+1 rule came into being. While Dortmund is a publicly traded company the total control still rests with old football club and with that by the fans.
"Fan owned" implies something completely different than what actually exists in Germany. And whoever thinks that fans have total control about football clubs in Germany is simply delusional (there is also a very important distinction to make between fans and club members). They have a stronger position in some clubs, but in the end it's not them who are calling the shots. If you had tried to tell me that the fans have total control over Eintracht Braunschweig five years ago I would have laughed hysterically at best (these days I might only smirk, since the new club leadership since then actually started to listen to the fans at least). Volkswagen didn't start to invest much into VfL Wolfsburg before the late 90s. VfL Wolfsburg as we know them today only came into being very shortly before the introduction of the 50+1 rule. They were a more or less normal 2nd division club up to the mid-90s, fielded a lot of local players and had attendances that were actually decent for a 2. Bundesliga club by the standards of that time. I don't know as much about Bayer Leverkusen, but I would guess there the company started to become heavily invested in the club sometime earlier. They certainly were in the 90s, and I guess might have started in the late 70s/80s.