For some years now, FC Schalke 04 and Borussia Dortmund have been in a race to become the club with the most members in the Pott. This is how it looks at the moment.
For some years now, FC Schalke 04 and Borussia Dortmund have been engaged in a close neck-and-neck race for the club with the most members behind Bayern Munich. It seems that BVB currently has its nose in front again.
That was not always the case. For a long time FC Schalke 04 had a huge advantage over BVB in terms of membership. This only changed with the increasing sporting success of the black and yellow team under Jürgen Klopp. Membership numbers shot through the roof and in 2016 Dortmund overtook its rival from Gelsenkirchen in terms of members for the first time. At the time, BVB had 145,000 members and Schalke just over 144,000. BVB managing director Hans-Joachim Watzke announced somewhat grandiloquently at the club’s 2016 general meeting: “We’re now the second-largest club in Germany, we’ve overtaken the Blues and they’ll never match us again.”
But Watzke had done his sums without the loyalty of Schalke’s supporters. In September 2018, BVB gave its number of members as around 154,000, while FC Schalke 04 had 156,110 members (as of 11 September 2018). This meant that the Knappen were once again the second-largest club in Germany, ahead of their arch-rivals from Dortmund.
After that, the “lead” changed back and forth depending on the statistics day and source. This is because there are no fixed days on which the clubs have to give figures. What is clear is that both clubs have been able to increase their membership figures again since 2018 and are still close together. Whereby the Knappen of course had to cope with the relegation to the 2nd league, which initially caused a dent. “We have had fluctuations in the last 24 months. We had a lot of departures. And in the last few months you can say that if we can believe the development of the membership figures, then the club has done a lot right,” explained Schalke’s Director of Fans and Sustainability Sebastian Buntkirchen in May.
Now there are current comparable figures again: While S04 currently speaks of 165,000 members in its membership magazine, Dortmund also published a new figure in November: “Borussia Dortmund’s membership has risen to 168,163 and has thus reached an all-time high,” the club stated on its homepage. This means that BVB now also has a notable majority over the Königsblauen.
This makes BVB the fourth largest sports club in the world behind FC Bayern Munich (295,000 members), Benfica Lisbon (267,000) and the German Alpine Club. Schalke lurks behind in fifth place.
Here’s how it looks in the Bundesliga:
Bayern Munich 295,000
Borussia Dortmund 168,163 (source: BVB)
FC Schalke 04 165,000 (source: S04)
1.FC Cologne 120,887
Eintracht Frankfurt 120,000
Borussia Mönchengladbach 98,000
VfB Stuttgart 76,700
Union Berlin 48,364
SC Freiburg 46,000
Hertha BSC 44,211
Werder Bremen 42,407
Bayer Leverkusen 30,000
VfL Bochum 22,123
FC Augsburg 21,730
VfL Wolfsburg 21,500
1.FSV Mainz 05 14.00
TSG 1899 Hoffenheim 11,000
RB Leipzig 750
(Source of other figures: Wikipedia)
