Jägermeister

In the early 1970s, putting a commercial logo on a football shirt was still forbidden in the Bundesliga. For Jägermeister, however, the football shirt represented something far more valuable than advertising space: access to a mass audience that crossed social and regional boundaries.

The opportunity came at Eintracht Braunschweig, a club that was struggling financially. The aftermath of the 1971 Bundesliga scandal had damaged the club’s relationship with its supporters and attendance had fallen, leaving Eintracht in serious financial difficulty. Jägermeister managing director Günter Mast saw an opportunity.

Mast and Eintracht president Ernst Fricke agreed on a five-year deal worth DM 500,000 - DM 100,000 per year. But there was a problem: the German Football Association (DFB) prohibited advertising on football shirts.

So they didn't technically put an advertisement on the shirt. They changed the club badge!

Eintracht had traditionally been represented by a red lion. In January 1973, club members voted overwhelmingly to replace it on the professional team's shirt with the Hubertus stag head, the instantly recognisable symbol from the Jägermeister bottle. The amateur sections of the club retained the traditional lion.

It was a remarkably simple piece of branding and a remarkably clever loophole!

The DFB fought back. It eventually allowed the new badge, but only under restrictions: the stag had to be reduced to 14 centimetres and the initials E.B. had to be incorporated to make clear that it was still an Eintracht Braunschweig emblem. On 24 March 1973, Eintracht Braunschweig walked onto the pitch against Schalke 04 with the stag on its chest. The match ended 1–1, but the result was almost irrelevant. German football had just entered a new commercial era.

The DFB officially legalised shirt advertising later that year, in October 1973. Eintracht had therefore not simply found a way around the rules, its experiment helped establish the model that would soon become standard throughout German football.

And Jägermeister understood exactly what it had achieved. The controversy generated enormous media attention before the shirt had even appeared in a Bundesliga match. According to Eintracht's own historical account, Mast released the full DM 500,000 payment as early as May 1973 because of the publicity the campaign had generated.

The partnership continued until 1987, making the stag a part of Eintracht's visual identity for more than a decade. In 1983, the relationship went even further: club members overwhelmingly voted for a proposal to rename the club FTSV Jägermeister Braunschweig. The DFB rejected the idea, ruling that a club name could not be used for advertising purposes.

What makes the shirt so important today is not simply that Jägermeister was an unusual sponsor. It represents the moment when the football shirt stopped being purely a symbol of the club and became commercial real estate.