I always find it crazy how German fans always brag about their number of members but then it always turns out how irrelevant they actually are.
238,000 members and only 4,476 participated?!?!?
1.9% of members decided on the most important role in the club?!?
Were the rest not allowed to participate or did they simply not want to?
Same with the Bayern election.
432, 500 members, no one has more and the Bayern fans will remind everyone of that.
But the president is decided at the AGM with 1,990 members. 0.46% of the members decided on the most important position in the club.
Despite the great praise for 50+1 (don’t misunderstand the concept, I think it’s very good), the members are still quite irrelevant in their clubs.
You are completely misclassifying the voter turnouts. If practically everyone agrees in advance what should happen, then for many people there is no reason to vote – according to the motto: The other members will vote for the candidate we all want anyway.
Yes, 1.9% decided on the (really?) most important role in the club. But there was no opposing candidate. There was no real current in the club that didn’t want Aki Watzke as president. So if the election is practically decided before the election, why do I have to cast my vote? Rhetorically asked.
I would still always vote, especially because if there was too little turnout the election would go wrong and would have to be repeated.
If it had really been about “something important”, for example if Watzke had had an opponent who was in clear contrast to Aki, then significantly more members would have voted because it could have been close and every vote could theoretically be the decisive one.
So little can be derived from voter turnout. Jumping to a conclusion that members simply have no interest is going in completely the wrong direction.
41 percent of participating members would rather have no president than Watzke. You have to let that melt in your mouth, it’s a very weak result.
Let’s see how Watzke will react to this – I’m not saying…
And you also took a wrong turn somewhere. 41 percent of the participating members do not “rather have no president than Watzke,” but rather just a different president than Watzke.
The question wasn’t: Watzke or no one at all? But: Should it be Watzke? If the vote had been against Watzke, the election would probably have been repeated (with an expected significantly higher voter turnout). If the vote had been against Aki again, they would have had to look for an opposing candidate.
The more I think about it, the weirder I find your post. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t meant to be an attack. Did you leave out even the missing thought, but do you really think the question of choice was: Do you want Aki Watzke? And if no, then BVB will not have a president in the future!?
So it’s obvious that another president would then be found? Am I on the fence or are you?
I already wrote this in another post: The result is actually a big victory for Watzke. It was practically already decided that he would become president and only had to be confirmed by an election. The matter was so clear that 1. Hardly anyone had to vote because everyone was actually for Aki Watzke and 2. Those who absolutely wanted to prevent Watzke were not even able to prevail with a 1.9% voter turnout. The choice was so clear that even Aki’s fiercest opponents were unable to prevail in an election with 4,476 people voting.
How would the election have turned out if all members had voted? Around 2,700 votes were enough to overcome Watzke’s harshest critics. If all ~240,000 members had voted, the number of critics would probably have disappeared completely and a result of >90% Pro Watzke would have been expected.
So Watzke doesn’t have to react to the result at all. If so, he can count the result as a clear success.