Picture this: 81,365 people packed into Signal Iduna Park, tens of thousands of voices bellowing players' surnames back at the announcer, a wall of black and yellow flags whipping above Europe's largest standing terrace. By every observable measure, last Saturday's home win over Eintracht Frankfurt, settled by Max Beier's lone goal and enough to pull Dortmund level with Bayern Munich at the top of the Bundesliga, looked exactly like what Borussia Dortmund have always been: the gold standard of football atmosphere. And yet, the club had spent the 24 hours before kick-off running a points-based rewards scheme to persuade their own supporters to put their phones away. Whether that is community building or soft coercion dressed up in brand language is exactly the question worth sitting with.
So What Actually Happened?
The scheme itself was straightforward enough, and just slightly bizarre when you spell it out. Dortmund introduced a "fan mode" on the club's own app. Supporters who activated it before the Eintracht match earned points for every minute they left their phones untouched. The least distracted fans were entered into a draw for signed jerseys and gift cards to the club merchandise store. In other words: the club used a phone-based app to reward fans for not using their phones.
You have to at least admire the audacity of that contradiction. The feature was named "fan mode", which, as the source piece correctly notes, is passive-aggressive in a way that could only have been invented either by a very clever person or a very oblivious marketing department. The implicit message embedded in the name is impossible to miss: if you are checking your notifications during a Bundesliga match, you are not in fan mode. You are doing it wrong. Dortmund did not say this out loud, but they absolutely said it.
The Influencer Problem Is Real. This Goes Further
To be fair to Dortmund, the instinct behind this initiative is not entirely without merit. Hertha Berlin and Dynamo Dresden, both operating in the second division, went further still, banning commercial influencer-style videos in their grounds outright. Their concern is twofold: protecting the value of their TV rights deals, and defending the match-day experience from people treating the terraces as a content studio. Dortmund appear to share that concern. The Yellow Wall is one of the most recognisable images in world football, and it has predictably become catnip for influencers looking to monetise somebody else's culture.
The same thing is eating away at elite tennis. The US Open credentialed more than 100 content creators this season, and the situation got so out of hand that a chair umpire had to stop play to ask an influencer to switch off a ring light. Wimbledon, to their credit, simply refuses to credential influencers at all, though that does not stop them walking in on a sponsor's ticket like everyone else. The pattern is consistent across sport: where there is atmosphere, there are people looking to extract and sell it.
But here is where Dortmund's initiative diverges from what Hertha and Wimbledon are doing. Banning commercial operators from filming content for profit is a defensible business decision. Asking your season-ticket holders to surrender their right to photograph the moment their team wins a Bundesliga six-pointer, in exchange for points toward a club shop voucher, is something else. That is not policing parasites. That is policing your own community.
Who Actually Owns the Match-Day Experience?
Dortmund chief executive Carsten Cramer made the case with full conviction. "Over 81,000 people in the stadium, singing, cheering, and holding their breath together: this here and now is irreplaceable," he said. Vodafone Germany CEO Marcel de Groot, who has a commercial stake in the partnership and therefore a complicated relationship with the notion of people using fewer phones, added that fans should focus on the field rather than a screen. Both men delivered their lines with the confidence of people who had not considered that they might be wrong.
The issue is that the fans who spend significant money attending these matches have a reasonable claim to experiencing them however they see fit, within the law. The question of whether a ticket constitutes membership of a community with behavioural expectations, or simply the purchase of entertainment you are entitled to consume on your own terms, is one football has never had to answer directly before. Musicians have wrestled with it for years: the sea of lit-up phone screens at gigs has infuriated artists who see it as a form of disengagement. But even there, nobody has started a points scheme. [Brighton's ascent toward the top five](/uprise/football/brighton-are-the-apex-b-club-their-next-target-should) and Dortmund's sustained fan-first reputation represent two of European football's more genuinely optimistic stories. It would be a shame if either club's relationship with its supporters curdled into a lecture about correct attendance behaviour.
The Bundesliga Context Makes This Even More Complicated
There is something specifically pointed about this debate erupting at Dortmund. The Bundesliga's 50+1 ownership rule, which ensures fans retain majority control of almost every club in the league, has made German football a kind of protected habitat for supporter culture. Cheap tickets, genuine community ownership, a league that structurally resists the kind of private equity strip-mining that has reshaped English football: the Bundesliga is what it is because the fans are, on paper, the bosses.
That is why the optics of Dortmund incentivising fan behaviour with gift cards sits awkwardly. The Yellow Wall did not become the most celebrated terrace in the world because a club app told people to sing louder. It got there organically, over decades, because Dortmund supporters built something. The club benefited from it enormously, attracted global attention because of it, and, yes, attracted the influencers who are now the stated problem. There is a slight irony in the institution that benefited most from organic fan culture now running a programme to manage and shape that same culture.
[Bayern's capacity to grind out results even in difficult circumstances](/uprise/football/bayern-munich-hold-off-freiburg-in-first-game-without-kompany) is often held up as the mark of champions. Dortmund's fan culture is supposed to be their equivalent: something that wins regardless of external pressure. Programmes like this one risk undermining the very thing they are trying to protect.
What Does This Say About Football's Relationship With Its Supporters?
The broader question underneath all of this is one football is going to have to confront more often as clubs become, in the words of the original piece, "production houses who also field company teams." If the match-day experience is a product, fans are consumers. If fans are consumers, they get to consume as they please. If clubs want to define what attending a match means, they are making a claim on something more complex: that fandom is a covenant with obligations on both sides.
American sports lean heavily toward the consumer model. Announcers tell crowds when to cheer. Jumbotrons instruct them what to chant. The atmosphere is curated rather than created. European football has always operated on the assumption that its supporters are something different: active co-creators of the spectacle, not passive recipients of it. That distinction has driven the global appeal of the game. It is what made the pre-match and half-time entertainment at the World Cup final feel so jarring to people who just wanted to hear the Argentina supporters sing.
The problem is you cannot have it both ways. You cannot celebrate the organic, supporter-driven atmosphere of the Yellow Wall when it suits the brand, then deploy a loyalty scheme to course-correct it when it does not. Dortmund's fans built that terrace. The club did not build it for them.
Our Verdict
The influencer problem is real, and dealing with it firmly is entirely reasonable. Hertha Berlin and Dynamo Dresden's outright bans on commercial filming are clean, honest policies with a clear rationale. What Dortmund launched last Saturday is murkier. Rewarding supporters for putting their phones away treats the symptom while misidentifying the patient. The fans who are genuinely creating atmosphere are not the problem. The fans filming it for monetised content are. Conflating the two, and using a points scheme to nudge behaviour you find aesthetically undesirable, is a paternalism that the Bundesliga's fan-first reputation cannot easily accommodate.
The Yellow Wall does not need gamification. It needs the club to trust that the culture its supporters built is resilient enough to survive a few influencers, and to deal with those influencers directly rather than by running loyalty schemes at the people who turned up to cheer. If Dortmund want fans to be present, they should start by treating them as adults who are perfectly capable of deciding what presence means to them.