SPORTS AND SOCIETY 521
The East German soccer clubs, however, found themselves faced with
the challenge of adapting their structures to those of West Germany, which
also meant jumping unprepared into the commercialization that had
reigned in the Bundesliga since the end of the 1980s. In 1995, the “Bos-
man” judgment opened up the market for player transfers, which brought
a huge increase in the percentage of foreigners playing in the Bundesliga,
as well as skyrocketing salaries for soccer players. In the wake of this de-
cision, East German soccer clubs found themselves confronted by a major
“double change.”^105 The adaption to the Western structures was accompa-
nied by the need to respond to the ruptures that had been sparked by the
“Bosman” case. Two paths of possible assimilation emerged: on the one
hand, some of the East German clubs jumped on the bandwagon, so to
speak. On 6 April 2001 in its match against VfL Wolfsburg, Energie Cott-
bus actually became the fi rst Bundesliga club whose starting line-up was
comprised entirely of players from other countries. On the other hand, the
economically weak clubs in the East could hardly keep up with pressure
of the transfer market, which led to a renaissance in the eff orts of their
own youth departments.^106 The integration of the East German clubs into
the Bundesliga also coincided with a “changing of the tide in soccer re-
porting.”^107 Private television not only fed into a further commercialization
of the sport, but also spurred on a transition from classic sport reporting
to sports entertainment shows and infotainment, which was what was of-
fered as of 1992 with the SAT1 show “ran.” Since the East German clubs
had little experience with this commercialization or the media, it was dif-
fi cult for them to capitalize on the increasing tabloidization of the sport to
enhance their public images. Some of these clubs also faced a tough de-
cision about which elements of their GDR traditions should be discarded,
but also which aspects of this legacy should be kept in order to cater to
the regional, or rather East German, longing for familiarity.^108
Institutional Transfer and “Associational Growth”Whereas a considerable portion of the East German sports elite headed
to the West in 1990, institutional transfers ran in the opposite direction.
New federal states were formed in the GDR, which then joined the Fed-
eral Republic in accordance with Article 23 of the Grundgesetz. Sports
followed the same pattern. Regional associations for the diff erent sports
disciplines were created, and they joined together in newly founded state
sports associations in the fi ve new federal states. These new “corpora-
tive bodies”^109 then became part of the national Deutsche Sportbund.
Over the course of 1990, several delegations of politicians and sports
offi cials visited the former strongholds of the GDR elite sports apparatus.