During a recent trip to Germany, Pitchcare’s Dave Saltman and Laurence Gale had the opportunity to look around the new stadium of Bayer Leverkusen with Head Groundsman, Dieter Prahl
Working I
guess that most of you will have heard of Bayer Leverkusen Football Club from their numerous Champions League and UEFA cup ties against British opposition. But, I wonder how many realise that they are owned by Bayer, part of the same company as Bayer Environmental Science, the leading chemical company whose products include Chipco Green, Spearhead, Dedicate, Merit Turf etc. Leverkusen is in Germany’s North
Rhine-Westphalia region and is home to the headquarters of Bayer ES. The Bayer Leverkusen Sports Club was formed in 1904 when a group of 170 employees petitioned Friedrich Bayer and Co. to support the initiative. Bayer 04 Leverkusen Football Club, to give them their correct name, are the flagship branch of a still huge and thriving sports complex. Today, Bayer’s sports clubs in
Dieter Prahl 84
Leverkusen alone have a membership of around 18,500. Three of the company’s other German plants - in Wuppertal- Elberfeld, Krefeld-Uerdingen and Dormagen - also have their own sports clubs. Altogether, there are twenty-seven sports clubs with over 50,000 members.
Bayer Leverkusen won the UEFA Cup in 1988 before going on to win the German Cup in 1993. After finishing second in the Bundesliga on various occasions the club reached the UEFA Champions League final in 2002, losing to Real Madrid 2-1, a further highlight in the history of the club. As with any successful professional club they needed to move with the times. To help achieve this the BayArena stadium has had a major facelift. The main aim was to increase the capacity of the stadium (now 30, 000) whilst, at the same, time providing new facilities for players, staff, VIP guests and members of the press. The old West Stand was replaced by a brand new, state-of-the-art building along with a total new roof design that provides better protection from the weather. The total cost of the project was 70,000,000 euros, with around 1,000,000 euros being spent on a new pitch. Laurence Gale and myself were given a tour of the new stadium where we met up with Dieter Prahl, the stadium’s Head Groundsman. Dieter has worked at the club for more than forty years. He started his career in agriculture
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