Introduction of the Bundesliga

The Introduction of the Bundesliga was the long-debated step of establishing a top-level association football league in Germany in 1963. The new league, the Bundesliga, played its first season in 1963–64 and continues to be the highest league in the country. Its introduction reduced the number of first division teams in Germany from 74 to 16 and finally eliminated the problem of the top-teams having to play uncompetitive teams in regional leagues.

While the league was only finally introduced in 1963, plans and suggestions for a national league date back as far as the early 1930s, when a Reichsliga was proposed. The process of forming such a league went hand-in-hand with the discussion over professionalism in German football. While a limited form of professionalism was approved in 1932 it was, because of the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933, not implemented until after the Second World War.

Germany introduced a national championship in 1903 which, for the first 60 years, was played in a knockout format, whereby the top clubs of the regional football championships would qualify for the finals. The season annually culminated in a final, of which VfB Leipzig's 7–2 win over Deutscher FC Prag in 1903 was the first while Borussia Dortmund's 1963 victory over 1. FC Köln was to be the last.

Quite early on in the history of German football, attempts were made to form a single-division national league to replace the multitude of regional top-level leagues. The driving force behind this was the idea of having a league which would include only the best teams in the country, contrary to the original system where strong clubs would play together with weaker ones in small local competitions and would only be truly challenged at the German finals round.

Football in Germany, in the 1920s and 1930s, was strictly amateur and the German Football Association, the DFB, strove to keep it this way. The establishing of a top league, the Reichsliga, was seen as going hand in hand with the legalisation of professionalism, as the clubs saw these two steps as serving a common goal. The DFB however remained fiercely anti-professionalism. The DFB outlawed games between German clubs and the professional clubs from Austria, banned players who were found to have accepted any form of payment and even banned whole teams, like FC Schalke 04.Felix Linnemann, president of the DFB at the time, wished for the introduction of the Reichsliga but failed to get the motion passed by the regional associations in 1932.

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