The rebranding of the Bundesliga has been a success

On March 19, 2024, the DFL, Deutsche Fussball Liga, the organization overseeing the management of the two top professional football leagues in Germany, announced record revenues for the 2022/23 season. For the first time in history, the combined revenues of the Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 teams exceeded 5 billion euros, a figure 9% higher than the previous record set during the 2018/19 season. This exponential growth has completely or almost entirely wiped out the negative effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Bundesliga is a league on the rise, and in September 2024, another historic milestone was reached with the formalization of the agreement with Relevent Sports. The goal is clear: to increase the presence and visibility of the Bundesliga in the United States through new commercial contracts, but above all through the sale of TV rights starting from the 2026/27 season, which in the United States will be handled by Relevent Sports.

The expansion of the Bundesliga into the U.S. market confirms two aspects. The first is that the league's efforts to overcome the language barrier and break out of national boundaries have worked. The Bundesliga’s YouTube channel is filled with highlights and content produced in English. This has facilitated penetration into a market that would otherwise focus only on the Premier League and the Champions League, the two main players in European football. The second aspect concerns the success of the rebranding implemented at the start of the 2021/22 season, which projected the Bundesliga into a new dimension—a digital one, as the league itself admits. A complete rebranding starting from the logo, a red square featuring the white silhouette of a footballer in mid-air about to strike the ball. The choice of the geometric shape was deliberate; the square allows for easy adaptation of the logo to all formats required by social media profiles.

Along with a new logo, a new font has also been introduced, accompanying the Bundesliga in all its communications, whether it’s an official statement, a social media post, or a TV graphic. The aspect of on-air graphics is where the digital vision of the rebranding has focused. The graphic elements are minimal but constantly moving, rotating around an axis, starting from two base colors, red and gray, and then incorporating all the tones that belong to the history of the teams participating in the Bundesliga. It’s innovation tied to tradition. Added to this is the Bundesliga anthem, the symphonic music that announces the start of broadcasts and immediately lets viewers know that a Bundesliga match is about to air, following the same model as the Champions League.

All these elements have allowed the Bundesliga to project itself into the future. Competing with the Premier League is impossible, almost pointless, but thanks to these elements, the Bundesliga has confirmed itself as the second league in Europe for the value of local TV contracts (1.1 billion euros for the 2022/23 season alone). It is also through this new graphic dimension that the Bundesliga aims to increase revenues related to international TV rights and recover the 2 billion euros in earnings promised by private equity funds in exchange for the sale of 12% of the shares of a new media company of the German championship, a plan that never materialized due to protests from fans.