From district league to the Champions League
© TM/Imago
In 2000, Matthias Seidel Transfermarkt.de founded a hobby. Today, its portal is the world’s largest freely accessible football database, on which up to 6 million users frolic daily, and which now successfully acts globally with 27 domains from USA to Indonesia. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary, we went into the TM time machine and take a look back.
“As a big fan of Werder Bremen, who lived in Hamburg, I was looking for a way to get to my Werder news and rumors every day. In 2000, not all media were so present on the Internet that you could have called all football news on continuously and quickly. And so the idea grew up with the help of a big community that I needed. That’s why I founded Transfermarkt.de at the time,” Seidel looks at Seidel at the time, ” back to the beginning. He is “great proud” in view of the path, which has developed from a fixed idea in the past 25 years and that is by no means over. The development of transfermarkt.de is “an impressive story,” attested the 56-year-old. “Especially what we have created with our database and in particular the market values.”
When Seidel talks about the transfer market, the reference to the community usually comes at the beginning of his explanations. In retrospect, he is very grateful to many people, “but in the first place the user comes. With how much meticulousness the data collected and the high -quality discussions in the many forums were and will be and will be and the support in the news. And the motivation has always been fun.” Dissed up from the management in early 2025, Seidel continues to feed the database he created with game reports.
Transfer market is 25: milestones in TM history
2000: Transfermarkt.de sees the light of day. A rudimentary version of the football portal, conceived by founder Matthias Seidel, goes online for the first time. The TM database is created and grows. With the help of the user, it is fed with information, maintained and continuously updated.
2002: Seidel integrates the listing of the player consultants on transfermarkt.de, which increases the portal more and more to the reference work of the “specialist audience”.
2003: The first organized meeting of transfer users: 17 users meet in Dortmund in the party cellar of a parish. It is kicked, quizzed and celebrated.
2004: Seidel creates the market values. From now on, these are established as a fixture in the player profiles at the transfer market and are now one of the TM expenses.
2006: After the World Cup in Germany, Transfermarkt.de conducts the first major technical relaunch.
This is what transfermarkt.de looked like in 2006.
2007: The forum “Rumor Kitchen”, also one of the hobby horses of Transfermarkt.de, is linked to the extensive database, which is growing with the help of the TM user. In addition, the internationalization of the football portal is initiated: an Austrian TM version is the first offshoot.
2008: Transfermarkt.ch follows in Switzerland and in the same year the transfer market becomes part of the Axel Springer publishing house. In retrospect, Seidel emphasized: “The decision to get a partner on board with Axel Springer SE was my best strategic decision in the company’s history. In 2008 there were not even suitable corporate structures and just three employees.”
2009: Transfermarkt.co.uk comes to the United Kingdom and Transfermarkt.tv starts as a separate video portal with interviews and other moving image formats. With the transfer market season 2009/2010, the online portal is launching a print publication for the first time. The magazine sees itself as a complete soccer reference work for the season.
2010: Re-launch V3! The team gives the portal a new coat of paint. Shortly afterwards starts in Italy Transfermarkt.it. In the same year, the programmers develop the manager game that is still popular today before Transfermarkt.com.tr starts in Turkey.
This is what transfer market looked like in 2010.
2012: Transfermarkt.pl can be reached in Poland. Transfermarkt.de takes over Wahleetabelle.de, a portal that discusses referee decisions.
2013: With a transfer market, there is a foreign side in Spain. For the iPhone, later also for Android users, there is also a transfer market app for the first time.
2014: Transfermarkt.nl goes online in the Netherlands, Portugal is happy about transfermarkt.pt and for transfermarkt.de a responsive design is created in the large relaunch V4. With a lot of sweat and work, the online portal will miss a new coat of paint for the third time. A technical and optical complete conversion.
In the following years, the transfer market in Germany and the world continue to grow. In 2008 there were still three employees, Seidel already had eight colleagues in 2010, in 2017 and 20 and meanwhile there are more than 130 employees under the roof of the transfer market-here is the TM team.
Transfer market founder Matthias Seidel still gets involved as a partner.
2019: The internationalization of the transfer market brand becomes a focus topic and TM is established in various markets from the USA to Indonesia. Today you act successfully with 27 international domains.
“The interest in the transfer market is now huge worldwide. We are on growth course with all of our international domains and also gain users in the countries where we do not yet have a domain. Today, transfer market is definitely a global brand,” says Head of International Christian Schwarz.
2022: The next milestone: A player of a Baden-Württemberg district league team becomes the number 1,000,000 in the TM database.
2024: The transfer market recorded the game between Fortuna Cologne and Bayer 04 Leverkusen on match day 29 in the Regionalliga West 1972/73 game report number 2,000,000. “Our thanks to the entire transfer market family could not be bigger. The most important asset of the transfer market are users, admins, sponsors and data nurses, because they not only ensure that the forums are filled with life, but also that almost every spot on the football world card and thus almost every footballer can be found at the transfer market,” explains TM founder Seidel.
2025: Once founded from a hobby, the transfer market continues to stand standards in the football world: the TM domains record more than 100 million visits every month and up to 500 million page views. In the growing database, fans can fall back on 1.3 million player profiles and 2.1 million game reports and around 32 million users enjoy TM posts every day on social networks. Fin Lübbers, transfer markets Head of Marketing, attests: “Social media has long been a central component of our brand development-over 30 million new followers have been showing how well TM content works when relevance, speed and appealing design work together.”
25 years of transfer market: TM celebrates with anniversary content
An important part of the TM identity is the “stable smell” so much conjured up in football-numerous employees come from their own ranks, are their own plants or former community members who are now under contract with the transfer market. Christian Schwarz, one of the first registered users at all, wrote his master’s thesis on TM, made a traineeship in the TM editorial team and acts today as Head of International. Thomas Lintz, who registered as a user in 2005 to discuss Austrian football, went his way over the post of the site manager to the management. He forms this today with Simon Torrico, which was added in 2024. “Transfer market offers so many options: a great team, an excellent product and enormous potential. Together with Thomas and the entire transfer market team, I look forward to tackling our goals,” explained Torrico.
Seidel, however, took the operational scepter with the start of 2025: “I dressed almost every role: programmer, graphic artist, journalist, SEO expert, UI-designer, community manager, accountant. And every time I found someone who was able to take on this task competently, I handed it over to concentrate on new areas.” The founder continues to carry the transfer market in the heart (“My commitment and my passion”) and is happy with all TM users about a great anniversary. In the course of this, there will be anniversary content in the coming weeks-among other things with long-standing users, reviews of TM statistics from the past quarter of a century and all kinds of curious from the database and the TM history.
We wish you a lot of fun with it and say: Thank you for everything!