VfB Stuttgart mud battle: Hitzlsperger’s risky game – VfB Stuttgart

Stuttgart – At the start of the new year, private television companies are not giving up this year too to entertain hungover audiences with some classic films. RTL offers “separation with obstacles”, with “Look who’s talking”, Vox counteracts it, while RTL II has returned to rummaging through the file “And the groundhog greets every day”.

These movie titles would also fit VfB Stuttgart perfectly, but Bad Cannstatt’s traditional club doesn’t need any actors or scripts to cast a spell on audiences with great drama, bizarre defamatory comedy, and tragedy of ancient Greek proportions. The problem: There are no beaming heroes and no one can hope for a happy ending. It is not a movie, but a sad reality, in what unprecedented way the duo of leaders of climbers of the Bundesliga fight each other. In the main roles: CEO Thomas Hitzlsperger and President Claus Vogt.

The clean man becomes an executioner

Long ago it became increasingly clear that sports improvement and the internal environment do not go hand in hand. A complete escalation occurred when Hitzlsperger turned to “beloved VfB members and fans” on his homepage the day before New Year’s Eve to justify a step that would have seemed too absurd for any screenwriter: his bid for president. , which was briefly previously made public by the SWR.

Hitzlsperger changed the role of the clean man with the Federal Cross of Merit to that of prosecutor, judge and ruthless executioner in personal union, and pinned the acting president, honorary and president of the supervisory board with the most serious accusations in his letter of four pages: profile addiction, disability, intrigue. It was nothing short of a verbal execution, which should be a first even in the traditionally overheated soccer industry.

Also in four pages, the defendant counterattacked the next day to defend himself against “unfair and personal accusations, attacks and falsehoods. The public mud fight was finally perfect, which has yet to exist in this dimension, even with the crisis-tested VfB.

It was not Claus Vogt, but Thomas Hitzlsperger, who with his step now also publicly unearthed the ax – and thus raised many questions: Who or what made the chairman of the board, so popular with fans, to the equally popular chairman with so much dirt? throw in Why is he risking his largely flawless reputation, which has always been so important to him? Why do you jeopardize all credibility with your forward flight, control of the autocracy and the associated nullification of the separation of powers and ad absurdum the values ​​you love and often propagate, such as transparency and corporate governance?

The data scandal has put everything on slide

In other words: Why does Hitzlsperger pay such a high price just to get rid of a volunteer club president who has weaknesses in management and internal communication and has yet to get a women’s soccer team up and running? You do not have to be a fan of Vogt to follow his statement: “I will tell you openly and honestly what is behind it,” the president writes in his letter: “The investigation of the data scandal.”

For more than three months, the VfB has been grappling with the issue of transmitting tens of thousands of member data to third parties between 2016 and 2018. Claus Vogt promised full processing and commissioned external consultancy Esecon, but no information is yet available. a result. Consultants’ fees are now around 400,000 euros, so Hitzlsperger is now complaining of “uncontrolled escalation of costs” and fears the bankruptcy of the club.

For comparison: it is said that it was 700,000 euros that the public relations consultant Andreas Schlittenhardt raised from VfB. He was the man to whom the member’s data was available through a small official channel; the task of getting members to accept outsourcing was internally described as “guerilla marketing.”

Why don’t the members yet know what exactly happened and who was involved? “In recent weeks, there have been attempts on several occasions to torpedo the work of the Esecon law firm, limit its mandate and ultimately even terminate it without a final result,” writes Claus Vogt, an assessment also shared by some employees of VfB-AG. They speak of a wall of silence and the fact that there is not the slightest interest of the leadership in clarifying possible mistakes of the past. Not with CFO Stefan Heim, not with Marketing Director Jochen Röttgermann, and not with Communications Director Oliver Schraft, who has officially suspended his job since the matter became known.

Rainer Mutschler remains in office. As a project manager for outsourcing, he was at the forefront at the sinister moment and is now not only active in the youth performance center, but is also a member of the VfB’s three-person executive committee, which includes Bernd Gaiser, a close confidant of former club boss Wolfgang Dietrich, as well as himself and Claus Vogt. Mutschler and Gaiser are said to have rejected Vogt’s request to extend Esecon’s term to finally clarify the data issue, and the association’s advisory board followed suit. Another proof of Vogt’s complete isolation, who at least for the moment is not thinking of giving up.

Thomas Hitzlsperger is also a member of the so-called data affairs steering committee – as chairman and chairman of the board, he would like to put an end to the tedious investigation. “I cannot hide with my history, my passion, my responsibility and my position now,” he writes, “We are on our way to ruining what we have accomplished in the last twelve months. My candidacy should be a way out of this situation. “