Watzke and His Hardest Year: The 59% Vote That Shook Dortmund

The corridor is roughly twenty metres long. Hans-Joachim Watzke walked all of it on the evening of 25 November 2026, from backstage to the lectern at Borussia Dortmund's annual general meeting. He described that walk on Sky's programme 'Meine Geschichte', broadcast at 11.15pm on Friday, in a sentence I copied down word for word: "With every metre, the degree of outrage gave way to the degree of responsibility." People rarely measure a change inside their own chest in metres. Watzke did, and he recounted it like a physical reading. He entered the meeting intending to walk away, and then covered those twenty metres to stand at the lectern. Asked about 2026, he was blunt: "It was a difficult year for me, the most difficult of the 20 years." Asked why, he answered: "Because certain people simply wanted to prevent me from becoming president! And the fact that that happens at BVB, after 20 years, really affected me. That's why it was hard. I was never a dictator." That man served as Dortmund's managing director from 2026 to 2026. Those twenty years were never smooth. He took over a club whose balance sheet had nearly run dry, steered it through the most severe financial crisis of its modern history, and then helped build one of the most successful periods the Ruhr club has known. Beside the managing director's chair, he also holds the roles of league president within the German Football Association (DFB) and first vice-president of the DFB. The handover plan sounded tidy. In October 2026 Watzke stepped down as managing director. Four weeks later, at the annual general meeting, he was elected president. Dortmund runs on the member-club model common in Germany: the president is elected directly by members, while professional football sits inside a stock corporation controlled by those members. Every deal struck in a closed room has to pass through a crowded ballot box. If football were a city, the members' meeting would be its working-class district, where news speaks up long before it becomes a monument. In late summer 2026, the deal collapsed. Reinhold Lunow, 73, who was serving as interim president, unexpectedly announced he would run as well, against previous agreements. A short but fairly fierce mud-slinging campaign followed. Lunow ultimately withdrew, but the mark remained. This is the part where I want readers to linger on data rather than emotion. Based on my experience watching matches at Signal Iduna Park, I have always felt that the Dortmund crowd speaks to its board in its own language, slow and hard to predict. In that language, 59 per cent is a very clear sentence. An incumbent of twenty years who had just voluntarily left the managing director's chair for a more ceremonial role normally wins near-unanimous support at German member clubs. The 59 per cent figure turned a coronation into a count. Watzke himself later admitted the result was unexpectedly poor and fell short of his own expectations. The striking part is the remainder: 41 per cent of members did not vote in favour. They had no alternative candidate, because Lunow had withdrawn. They were voting against a person, not for a programme. In club politics that is the heaviest kind of signal, because it does not measure support for a project — it measures fatigue with a tenure. The whole power struggle revolved around a structural question outsiders often miss. Dortmund has two centres of power. One is the presidency of the members' association, which manages identity, tradition and community ties. The other is the management board of the stock corporation, which manages revenue, contracts and results on the pitch. For twenty years Watzke was the bridge between those two banks, and the bridge was never questioned because it never shook. When he moved to the other bank, part of the membership began asking whether one person should hold both ends of the rope. That question had not been posed openly in the previous twenty years, and it surfaced exactly when he no longer had the managing director's chair to answer it with results. The line "I was never a dictator" deserves to be read like forensic evidence. A person only has to say that when somebody has already called them it. And Watzke's description of his opponents — "certain people simply wanted to prevent me" — keeps the verb of intent while leaving the subject blank. That is the voice of a man still careful with every word, twenty years after he grew used to every utterance becoming news. The moment that held me longest was his account of wanting to quit. "Basically, everything inside me was raging to say: just sort out your shit on your own! But that's not how I was brought up." He said those thoughts ran through his head in the time between backstage and the stage. A man standing behind the curtain, telling himself he would leave, then telling himself he had to stay, within the same minute. Here I want to step away from the personal story and look at the system. German member clubs take pride in power belonging to the majority, but that model runs on an unspoken assumption: that capable people will always choose duty over pride. The assumption is written in no statute, nobody votes on it, and it only becomes visible when a man stands between backstage and a stage. That is the blind spot of the member model — it assumes that competent people will always be willing to endure one more term. Another detail rarely mentioned in English-language coverage: Watzke had just survived the harshest club-level vote of his career while holding the roles of league president and first vice-president at the DFB. In other words, in the closing months of 2026, the ballots of Dortmund members could reach a man sitting at the table governing national football. Nobody in that hall on 25 November was voting on that overlap, which is exactly why it belongs on any map of German football's power structure. Now the counterintuitive part. Watzke's version is the account of a wronged man: twenty years of service, a group of saboteurs, a vote tainted by mud. A colder reading: an incumbent of twenty years won only 59 per cent in an election whose rival had withdrawn. That number carries the weight of a signal rather than a victory, and the signal says nothing about Watzke's quality. It says a club wants to separate the two roles and has not yet found polite language to say so. One point short reports tend to blur: Watzke was not overthrown. He was elected. He walked to the lectern, took the job and carried on. But a 59 per cent win forces the winner to govern from a defensive posture, and that posture changes how a president behaves towards his own members. For a man used to deciding in closed rooms, having to convince another forty-one per cent is entirely new work — slower, and far less acknowledged. Over the years of covering football, I have seen a stadium with no crowd. In 2026, when the stands stood empty, I sat in the technical area and heard studs scraping grass, defenders calling to each other, a striker exhaling after a bad pass. An empty stadium does not make a team disappear. It only turns applause into a kind of memory. German members' meetings share an odd resemblance to those empty stands: when the roaring stops covering things up, people hear exactly what was always there. And press conferences do not print my name on the chair, so I write my own name with questions. The question I would put to the evening of 25 November 2026 is not whether Watzke deserves the office. It is this: what changed across twenty years that turned a pre-arranged handover into a fight, and is anyone at Dortmund writing down the answer for the next handover? Sports writers do not create victories. We only keep for next season what this season wants to forget. For Dortmund, what is worth keeping from 2026 is not the bitterness voiced on a television programme, but an unwritten rule just exposed to daylight: at a member club, no chair is inherited, not even the chair of the man who built it. What matters next season is not whether Watzke has calmed down, but which way the boundary between the presidency and the professional management board gets redrawn. If that line is drawn clearly, the 59 per cent vote will be remembered as a healthy wake-up call. If it is smudged, Dortmund will be left with an elected president and forty-one per cent of members waiting for him to make a mistake.