By all appearances, things on the Yellow Wall seemed as they always had been. The stadium announcer hollered out the first names of Borussia Dortmund’s starting lineup and the supporters responded with their last names, tens of thousands of voices bellowing as one. Dozens of black and yellow flags waved over Europe’s largest standing terrace, a mass of faces fixed on the field beneath them.
And then Signal Iduna Park, sold out with 81,365 fans, roared when Max Beier’s lone goal led Dortmund to victory over Eintracht Frankfurt last Saturday, putting the home side even on points with Bayern Munich atop the Bundesliga standings. Yet, apparently, a crisis of a sort has been churning just below the surface of what is, by broad consensus, Europe’s best home support. On Friday, Dortmund had announced a kind of bribery scheme.
A rewards program is probably a kinder way of putting it. Fans who stayed off their phones during the bout with Eintracht had the chance to win signed jerseys and earn gift cards to the club’s merchandise store. If they activated a so-called “fan mode” on the club’s app – a name so phenomenally passive-aggressive you can only applaud whoever came up with it – the club could count who unlocked their phones the fewest times during the game.
For every minute the fans left their phones alone, they got points. Dortmund are not the only German team to pick a fight with phones. Second-division clubs Hertha Berlin and Dynamo Dresden have banned commercial influencer-style videos in their stadiums altogether, fearing for both the integrity of the TV rights they sell and the experience of their fans.
Dortmund, likewise, appear motivated by the incursion of influencers, who are siphoning off and monetizing footage of the famous match-day experience and growing into a nuisance for regulars. This problem has also afflicted the tennis majors. The US Open now resembles an influencer convention more than it does a tennis tournament.
When the US Tennis Association credentialed more than 100 content creators this year, the influencers grew so disruptive that a match was stopped when a chair umpire had to ask them to turn off a ring light. Wimbledon has refused to credential influencers for just this reason, which doesn’t stop them from getting in with regular tickets or through sponsors. Dortmund’s attempt at shaping fan behavior, however, goes further than warding off the cultural content parasites.
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