Monheim city council rejects Bayer Leverkusen’s €120m “campus project” | OneFootball

Bayer Leverkusen have suffered a setback in their €120m Bayern-Munich style “Campus Project”. One of the Bundesliga’s “company clubs” wishes to emulate Bayern’s famous Säbener Straße developmental campus by building a facility featuring 12 football pitches in the small Westphalian town of Monheim. On Wednesday, the town’s city council rejected Leverkusen’s construction proposal. 

Monheim’s city council arrived at the decision during a Wednesday constituent meeting, primarily citing the concerns of “traffic congestion” and well as “ecological disruption“. The small town of approximately 43,000 inhabitants would obviously look very different after a top tier German football club put down roots. Local representatives of all four German mainstream political parties support the measure.  

All this may amount to a minor bureaucratic setback for Germany’s red company team. The amount of money invested in the plans to build the campus on Monheim’s Alfred-Nobel-Straße is immense. The project also has the backing of plenty of star power, with loads of Leverkusen stars past and present lending their names to a petition to break ground on the new facility. 

Leverkusen – who actually do not have a reserve team – seek to take the initiative in emulating Bayern’s developmental program. The non-50+1 club is also among those open to radically new ways of grooming new German football talent such as founding a new exclusive U21 league. Leverkusen seeks to increase not only its standing in the Bundesliga, but within the DFL and DFB councils as well.

One simply cannot envision that a club determined to permanently establish itself as a perennial contender – not to mention throw huge sums of money at it – will be denied. Local politician Markus Gronauer indicated that a slightly revised plan less disruptive to the local citizenry would be accepted. 

“This is not a case of denying Bayer anything, but of stopping the current urban land-use planning procedure,” Gronauer noted in a statement. “Many citizens oppose this plan because it would destroy one of our last green corridors. It is not a rejection of the Bayer 04 performance center in Monheim per se, but a signal: We need a revised plan that is better suited to our city.“

“We are open to discussion,” B04 sporting director Simon Rolfes noted in his own statement. “Meetings have been scheduled with the individual parties in a week’s time. We don’t have a Plan B. We will stick with this location and will carry on. We are commercial enterprise that invests and pays for everything ourselves.“

GGFN | Peter Weis