The God of Football Starts With Passive Skills-Chapter 241 - 65: The Wang Shuo Effect! New Skill: Inverted Foot! I’m Going to Overwhelm the Bundesliga’s Two-Footed Monsters
The 20-Million-Euro Man!
This was a new nickname the German media gave Wang Shuo after his transfer to Borussia Dortmund.
The transfer was met with widespread approval.
People always say transfers are high-risk, but Wang Shuo’s move was considered a very safe bet.
The fact that his coach was the familiar Klopp was especially important!
All that remained was to see how well the master and apprentice duo of Wang Shuo and Klopp would adapt to life at Dortmund.
However, some media outlets were skeptical about Wang Shuo’s transfer.
This was especially true for media outlets close to Bayern.
Rejecting Bayern—that was their reason for not being optimistic about Wang Shuo joining Dortmund.
What’s more, Rummenigge himself had personally spoken out.
But in capitalist Europe, the market has the final say.
For the past few years, Borussia Dortmund’s jersey sponsorship had been with Nike.
However, due to their lackluster performance in recent years, Dortmund’s commercial value had shrunk significantly. When it came time to negotiate a contract renewal with Nike, the two sides couldn’t agree.
After the contract expired in the summer of ’09, Dortmund had been searching for a new jersey sponsor.
The German brand Puma and the Italian brand Kappa were among the names on Dortmund’s list of potential partners.
After signing Wang Shuo, a deal was finally sealed.
The Italian company Kappa officially became Dortmund’s sponsor.
The specific sponsorship fee was not disclosed, but when Watzke announced the deal, he beamed and said, "We are very satisfied with this partnership!"
The sponsorship contract was for three years.
Incidentally, even though Mainz had lost Wang Shuo and Klopp, their status as last season’s number one dark horse in the Bundesliga had also caused their commercial value to soar, especially since they would be playing in the Champions League in the new season.
Their front-of-shirt sponsor was replaced by an energy company called ENTEGA, for a sponsorship fee of a whopping 5 million euros per year.
Of course, this couldn’t compare to established clubs like Bayern, VfL Wolfsburg, and Schalke 04.
But in the Bundesliga, it was solidly in the upper-middle tier.
Keep in mind, when Mainz was promoted last season, their jersey sponsorship income was only 1.5 million euros.
Werder Bremen is considered a long-standing powerhouse, right?
Their current annual sponsorship fee from Citibank is 8 million euros.
Borussia Mönchengladbach’s is only 4.5 million euros.
Not to mention, Mainz’s jersey sponsor was still Nike.
Christian Heidel’s management skills were truly no joke.
Additionally, Mainz’s club chairman, Strutz, had also become a board member of the German Football Association for the new season, serving as the vice chairman of the German Professional Football League.
One season as a legendary dark horse had allowed Mainz to completely turn their fortunes around!
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Meanwhile, the good news kept pouring in for Dortmund.
After signing the sponsorship deal with Kappa, Dortmund’s season ticket sales exploded.
It was well-known that Dortmund’s ticket market was famous for its fervor, not just in the Bundesliga but across all of Europe.
But this season was clearly different.
The new season’s training camp hadn’t even started, yet Dortmund had already sold over 40,000 season tickets.
What did that mean, exactly?
Dortmund’s own sales target for season tickets was capped at just 50,000.
In other words, before the team had even started training, the season tickets were already nearly sold out.
For other teams, even Bayern, selling over 10,000 was considered quite good.
At Dortmund, people were practically fighting over them.
And that wasn’t all.
After signing with Kappa, a brand new set of home and away jerseys for Dortmund was officially released.
The home jersey was still predominantly yellow, with black stripes on both shoulders and along the sides of the waist.
The away jersey was mainly black, featuring a pattern of dense, thin, yellow diagonal stripes.
As soon as the new jerseys were announced, they sparked a buying frenzy among Dortmund fans.
According to statistics from a famous German shopping search engine called Twenga, in the week after Wang Shuo’s transfer to Dortmund was announced, the popularity of his jersey skyrocketed, quickly soaring to first place in the Bundesliga.
It surpassed that of Bayern’s Ribery and Lahm.
It also outsold the jersey of fellow new Bayern signing, German international Mario Gomez.
"This proves how much the Dortmund fans welcome Wang Shuo’s arrival!"
But this also brought up a new problem.
Wang Shuo had not yet officially decided on his jersey number at Dortmund.
At Mainz, Wang Shuo wore the number 9 jersey.
But at Dortmund, the number 9 jersey belonged to Valdes.
The Paraguayan striker had been the team’s main forward ever since he joined Dortmund from Werder Bremen in the summer of ’06.
However, his performance had never quite met expectations.
Last season was actually his best one yet.
He scored 7 goals and had 6 assists in 29 matches.
As the iconic number for a striker, Dortmund also hoped Wang Shuo would be able to wear number 9.
After all, before Valdes, the Bumblebees’ number 9 jersey had always belonged to famous European goalscorers like Chapuisat, Bobic, and Jan Koller.
"After Wang Shuo joined the team, Dortmund hoped Valdes would, like Bobic back in the day, voluntarily give up the number 9 jersey. This would become another celebrated story for Dortmund."
In the summer of 2001, after the towering Czech forward Jan Koller joined Dortmund from the Belgian club Anderlecht, the then-owner of the number 9 jersey, Bobic, voluntarily gave it up and switched to number 16.
For the next five seasons, Jan Koller wore Dortmund’s number 9 shirt, scoring goals and leading the charge for the Bumblebees.
