St. Pauli is selling the stadium to its supporters

The St.Pauli once again confirms itself as a unique club in the international football scene. The latest initiative concerns their own stadium, the Millerntor-Stadion, a 23,000-seat facility that the club has decided to sell to its fans. This is not a joke. It is reality. St.Pauli needs to raise funds to reinvest in infrastructure that can ensure the club's continued success at a high level. Instead of turning to investment funds or searching for new sponsors, the club's management has decided to solve the issue in-house. And for this reason, on September 24th, the Football Cooperative Sankt Pauli 2024 was presented to the public, which is the St.Pauli fans' cooperative that will help the club raise the desired funds. And the cooperative's first significant act will be to purchase a majority share of the stadium ownership.

But how does it work? The first step was to appoint four members to the board of directors of the Football Cooperative Sankt Pauli 2024. The second step will be to evaluate applications for membership in the cooperative. Operations will begin in the coming weeks, but interested individuals can join the waiting list through the official website. Memberships are open to all, but the board's task will be to evaluate all applications and accept only those who are truly committed to participating for the good of St.Pauli. The membership fee, as reported by the New York Times after interviewing St.Pauli's president Oke Göttlich, is 850 euros. Once memberships are collected, the funds will be used to purchase the majority shares of the Millerntor-Stadion. At that point, the stadium will become the property of the fans' cooperative, which will then lease it to St.Pauli. "We assume that the members will be in favor of St. Pauli, not against us, and therefore they could decide to reduce the rent if we were in the third or fourth division, or increase it if we were doing really well. This is a very positive thing because it gives flexibility to the cooperative," Göttlich explained in his interview.

The stadium is valued at around 60 million euros, and the club's goal is to raise around 30 million euros. Owning the stadium will also allow the cooperative to manage events and further capitalize on it. In the short term, the cooperative also aims to generate a cash flow that can provide annual dividends for all members. And if things go well, the cooperative may also expand its influence to other departments of St.Pauli. This is an unprecedented operation in the history of football, confirming that St.Pauli is a club that manages its affairs in its own way. "Even if we criticize certain aspects of professional football, we ourselves are part of this system and we want to survive," it says on the cooperative's official website. And to survive, St.Pauli could have followed the path taken by all other clubs and made sponsorship deals with betting or cryptocurrency companies. But no. St.Pauli once again chose not to compromise its values. So in times of need, they turned to the people who love them, the most natural and yet complicated gesture to make when facing difficulties. It will be the fans who finance the team and the future of the club, with the certainty that whether it's the Champions League or the 3.Liga, it won't make a difference. St.Pauli will always be St.Pauli.