NEWS: The Sunday Column

Paul Schmidt-Troschke's Sunday column on all things football and the World Cup. 

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Transcript

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Hello and welcome to this week's World Cup Football, etc. Sunday column with me, Paul Schmetroschke. What happened on the last game day of the 2025-2026 season in the 2nd Bundesliga, Germany's second division just two weeks ago, can only be described as a football dream come true, even though not for many. Somewhere in the Saarland, the smallest of the 16 German states, a tiny football club called SV Elversberg, or SVA for short, located in the village of Elversberg with just 13,000 inhabitants, accomplished the unthinkable promotion to one of Europe's top leagues, the German Bundesliga. This story is already one for the history books, but for many different but equally remarkable reasons. And if there is one through line in all of this, it is an unshakable trust in bold decisions born out of scarcity. It all began back in 1989. Elversberg was in deep financial trouble and caught in a debt trap when the manager of a local pharma corporation and ex-Second Bundesliga player Frank Holzer rescued the club by paying the full debt amount of 800,000 Deutsche Mark, almost a million euros in today's money. He became president of the SVE and made the club's revival and success to his labour of love. The firm he had ownership in, locally headquartered Ursafarm, became the main sponsor, and Frank Holzer's investment strategy till today is following a BRICS Not Alex approach, meaning that money was used to improve and expand physical and personnel sports infrastructure and not to pay for expensive transfers and player salaries. And this strategy paid off more than anybody could imagine. After the appointment of Holzer, the club immediately improved its performance and managed to enter the Upper Division South West, what used to be the German third division in 1996. In 2011, Dominik Holzer, son of Frank Holzer, became the new president and built up the club further, temporarily culminating in the 2020 promotion to the third Bundesliga, and just one year later, promotion to the second division was achieved. Holzer also identified a big benefit of the club, namely its small size with just over 3,000 members, which makes decision making very efficient compared to bigger clubs with tens or even hundreds of thousands of members. Even though the SVA has a wealthy patron heavily supporting the financial backbone of the club, this is not at all an example of success driven by money, as it is the case with so many other clubs and even whole leagues all around the world. With the likes of Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City, or even German clubs like RB Leipzig. RB stands for Red Bull, or the TSG Hoffenheim, which was propped up and is still backed by the global software giant SAP. This gets obvious when comparing the transfer balances of Elversberg and RB Leipzig over the same time. In the three seasons before Leipzig got promoted to the Bundesliga, it incurred a loss of over 50 million euros, while the SVA netted almost 7 million. And in total, Ursafarm invested around 30 to 50 million euros into the club, less than the amount RB Leipzig lost over just two transfer periods in the second Bundesliga. But what was it, if not money, what made this incredible story of success possible? The main answer is scouting. The most important transfer in the club's history was made in 2017, but not in the form of a player, but in the scouting department, when Niels Ole Burg, former professional football player himself, was appointed as a scout and quickly became sporting director. The DNA of his philosophy was as bold as simple. Provide young unknown talents with a low pressure environment and lots of opportunities to prove their talent, and success is pre-programmed. And this is exactly what happened. The most famous players who earned his stripes at Elversberg is no other than Newcastle's forward and 100 million euro transfer Nick Voltemarder. But many other players were uplifted by Borg's philosophy, which of course also paid off financially to every stakeholder. And then, in 2025, the stage was set. As for Elvisberg, dominated the second Bundesliga from the get-go, and even the stress due to huge personnel changes in both team and administrative body during the winter break could not shake the determination of every single Elversberger to put the previously unknown name on the national and even the global stage. And with a statement of a 3-0 victory over Poisson Münster in its home stadium, the Ursafarm Arena under Kaiserlinde, S4 Elversberg managed to become the smallest club to ever play in the Bundesliga and now has the honor to have the Saarland represented in the league for the first time in over 30 years. And I am absolutely sure that this was not the last time Elvisberg made headlines previously unimaginable. So that's it from us for today.

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