This meant that the new league needed to have not only as many big and tradition-laden clubs as possible in order to be attractive, it also needed to cover as many regions as possible in order to be truly nationwide and become popular everywhere. ( See 'A league of their own - part one'.) So it was necessary to minimise the risk. There was no guarantee this would work and many observers did indeed predict that the league was doomed to fail and clubs would be ruined. If the system suggested above had been used, big and strong clubs like Schalke (from the Oberliga West) and Stuttgart (from the Oberliga South) would have been kept out at the expense of smaller and weaker teams such as Worms (from the Oberliga Southwest) and Spandau (from the Oberliga Berlin).Īnother reason was that the DFB introduced two novelties at once, professionalism and a nationwide league.

One was that the Oberligen were not of equal strength. However, that was impractical for a number of reasons. There were five Oberligen, which formed German top-level football in 1962, so you could have said the best four teams from each would qualify for a 20-team Bundesliga. That left the DFB only twelve months to legalise professionalism and organise an entirely new competition, let alone answer pressing questions such as: How many teams will the new league have? And which ones?įrom a modern viewpoint, one tends to think it would have been possible to simply use the coming campaign to determine the make-up of the Bundesliga, the way reforms of the league system have been handled ever since. It was decided to start the new league as early as possible, in August of the coming year, 1963. However, the trouble had only just begun. Hermann Gosmann was the DFB president during the formation of the Bundesliga and remained in the position until after the 1974 World Cup PA Photos There was a lot of hand-shaking and back-slapping and when the result of the vote was announced over the tannoy to the fans watching Borussia Dortmund play a friendly against Bremerhaven at the nearby Rote Erde ground, the news was met with a round of applause. What came to be known as the Bundesliga, literally: federal league, won the vote in an unexpectedly one-sided manner, 103-26.

On July 28, 1962, 129 German FA (DFB) delegates voted on the formation of a nationwide, professional league during their annual meeting in Dortmund.

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