Quote:
Originally Posted by The Big Chill
Why do they hate the guy so much?
|
he's invested heavily and basically bought them into the BL. They were a very small club before that (it's a town of 35,000 people, after all), but he is from the area and wanted them to become big. It's not all that different from RB Leipzig, they both tried to find loopholes in the regulations in order to grow quickly. In Germany, you can't just do a Man City and pump unlimited resources into a club ... in Germany, there's "50+1", which tries to avoid sugar daddies taking over clubs. Very basically the rule says that investors can't have a majority vote. Leipzig and Hoffenheim have circumvented this, for example Leipzig only have 7 official members (which were all installed by RB, obviously).
so he quickly became an enemy for fans who saw tradition and values betrayed by those investors, which is understandable. However, a lot of the criticism has simply been in very poor taste. Dortmund started that years ago with crosshairs-banners:
that's kind of been a staple over the years and Hopp has tried to fight back. He's gone to court, trying to defend himself and recently also got the league to ban Dortmund fans from a couple of away games at Hoffenheim. That has led to an escalation among BL fans and banners like those can be seen frequently right now. Today's the first time that a game was temporarily suspended because of that, so we'll see how things will be handled in the future.