Part IThe Story
Thirteen minutes in the rain
The rain came down hard on Sinsheim that afternoon. In the centre circle, two teams that were supposed to be opponents had stopped pretending. Leon Goretzka and Joshua Kimmich, in Bayern red, juggled a ball with Sebastian Rudy of Hoffenheim, and Thiago drifted over to join them. Soon the ball was rolling back and forth between the two sides with the idleness of a park kickabout. Except it was a Bundesliga match, on Saturday, 29 February 2020, before roughly 30,000 people, and the score was 6–0. For 77 minutes the game had been about nothing except Bayern Munich's superiority. For the last 13 it was about one man in the VIP stand.
It began with banners in the away end. One read Du Hurensohn, "you son of a whore," with the D and the H coloured blue so nobody could miss the initials. The referee was under instructions to stop play if insults appeared on banners or came from the stands, and he did. Bayern's manager, Hansi Flick, and its sporting director, Hasan Salihamidžić, ran to their own supporters shaking their heads, waving their hands, and holding up six fingers to point at the score, as if arithmetic might shame them. The players followed and tried to talk to the ultras in the first rows. The referee sent everyone to the tunnel. Manuel Neuer, the visiting captain, conferred with the Hoffenheim players and their manager. When the teams came back out they agreed, wordlessly and in front of everyone, to play no more football. So they passed. The home supporters booed them, because they had wanted the match abandoned.
The man in the VIP stand was 79 years old. Photographs show him looking bewildered while Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Bayern's chief executive, put an arm around his shoulder for comfort. Later the two men walked to the touchline holding hands. After the final whistle both teams applauded the crowd, except the Bayern section, and stood Dietmar Hopp in the middle of them. "This was the ugly face of football," Rummenigge said, "and of Bayern Munich." That evening Das Aktuelle Sportstudio, Germany's equivalent of Match of the Day, showed the highlights in silence, with no commentary.
The facts that made the scene possible are strange when set side by side. Hopp co-founded SAP, which by June 2025 was the most valuable company in Europe. He is among the richest men in Germany. Through a foundation he started in 1995, he has given away more than a billion euros, almost all of it within a short drive of the village where he grew up. He put an estimated €350 million into the village's football club, which he had played for as a teenager, and its supporters booed his would-be defenders in his name. The man the banners called a whoreson was the same man who, as a teenage striker for that club in the bottom division, had been paid one jar of homemade liver sausage per goal.
He would spend the next weeks being asked what he had done to deserve the crosshairs. It was a fair question, though not quite the one the banners were asking, which was older: whether a man can buy his way into belonging, and what it costs him if he tries.
By the Numbers
The Hopp Ledger
€350M+Estimated personal investment in TSG 1899 Hoffenheim
28MSAP shares used to endow the Dietmar Hopp Stiftung in 1995
€1B+Distributed by the foundation in its first 25 years, nearly all in the Rhine-Neckar region
9.33%Share of SAP over which Hopp held voting power at the end of 2007
80Hours per week Hopp recalls working in SAP's first decade
€1.2BInvested in biotech by 2017, with no euro yet returned
3,300Population of Hoffenheim, the village at the center of it all
The ledger on the kitchen table
Every evening his mother sat at the kitchen table and took out a small notebook. In it she wrote down exactly what she had spent that day. If the figures did not reconcile to the pfennig, Hopp recalled decades later, her mood darkened. He told the story to the Süddeutsche Zeitung in the conference room of his own golf club, with an annual net worth in the billions, and he told it plainly. There was no pocket money. "Gar keines," none at all. He carried coal. He collected scrap iron. He collected vineyard snails, the Weinbergschnecken that cling to the terraced slopes of the Kraichgau, and once filled two buckets in two hours, which paid "sensationally well." Asked what he did with the money, the co-founder of the world's largest enterprise software company laughed: he played the slot machine.
His older brother Rüdiger was in the room for that interview. He said he had come "only to listen," and then he talked anyway. As teenagers, he said, the two brothers' great dream was an air rifle, to shoot the sparrows that ate the chickens' feed. It cost 14 marks. They saved for two years.
Here is the family in a few strokes. The father, Emil, was a schoolteacher in a village of a few thousand people. The mother kept the household accounts with an auditor's severity. The youngest of four children was born in Heidelberg on 26 April 1940 and grew up in Hoffenheim, a place whose landmarks the Süddeutsche would later list with gentle cruelty: a lottery kiosk, a pizzeria called Mira Lago, two banks, a large church, a bakery advertising "jogging bread for 1.99," and a butcher, Metzgerei Geiser, selling hausgemachte Dosenwurst, homemade canned sausage. "One of those places," the reporter wrote. "Quickly in, quickly out."
The family's plans for its youngest were respectable and modest. "I was supposed to become a teacher or a priest," Hopp told the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung at 75. His mother had settled on it. When in 1972 he quit his secure job at IBM to start a software company with four colleagues, she was dismayed.
The parents also forbade football, because the older brother had once been hurt playing it. Hopp describes them as anständige Eltern, decent parents, and calls the ban grausam, cruel. He played anyway. His first match for the youth side of the Turn- und Sportgemeinschaft 1899 Hoffenheim, the TSG, was away at Dühren, just over the hill. He had no proper shorts and wore knickerbockers, which split on his first sliding tackle. He scored the equaliser in a 1–1 draw. Three years later, at 17, he was playing for the first team on a doctor's special dispensation, because he was officially too young for senior football. The league was the lowest in the region, sometimes the second-lowest. Village kickers.
Before any of that, there was a summer afternoon in 1954. On 4 July, the day of the World Cup final in Bern, a 14-year-old went to the Ratskeller two hours before kickoff, because it had the only television set in Hoffenheim and he knew it would be crowded. He had 30 pfennig. He bought a bottle of Libella lemonade and nursed it for the entire match, since he could not afford a second. Helmut Rahn scored from the edge of the box, West Germany beat Hungary 3–2, and the boy came out of the tavern with an idol, Fritz Walter. Seventy years and several billion euros later, the sources that tell this story agree on that detail: one bottle, made to last ninety minutes.
What the father did
Every German family of that generation has a cellar, and the Hopps' was public.
Emil Hopp was not only the village schoolteacher. In the 1930s he was a Truppführer in the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi brownshirts, and in November 1938, during the Kristallnacht pogrom, he commanded the destruction of Hoffenheim's synagogue. According to the account of two Jewish brothers who grew up in the village, he rounded up a few SA men on the morning after the pogrom night and finished the job. By their account, he had already broken into the synagogue with two comrades three years earlier and fought with their father. The brothers, Menachem Mayer and Fred Raymes, were children then. They were deported, survived, and scattered into exile, and decades later they wrote it all down.
Their memoir appeared in German as Aus Hoffenheim deportiert: Menachem und Fred, "Deported from Hoffenheim." According to the Munzinger biographical archive, the Hopp family financed the German translation, and Hopp later supported a documentary film about the brothers. The father's role reached the mainstream German press in February 2009. That was the season Hoffenheim, newly promoted, sat at or near the top of the Bundesliga. Die Welt ran a piece headlined "Hoffenheim and the dark side of the Hopp family." The village the country had just discovered as a football fairy tale had a ruined synagogue in its past, and the name on the stadium belonged to the son of the man who ruined it.
When the Frankfurter Allgemeine asked Hopp directly whether he had become a benefactor because he had something to make amends for, his answer was neither evasive nor fully absolving. Its structure deserves attention.
— Dietmar Hopp, to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (translated from German)My father was a teacher. When he received the order in 1938 to destroy the synagogue in Hoffenheim, he already had three children, my older siblings. Had he not done it, he would have been dismissed, and his family would have faced a hopeless time. What he did is to be condemned, even if no one died in it and he was not responsible for the deportation of the Hoffenheim Jews.
Context, then verdict, then mitigation. The condemnation is unambiguous, zu verurteilen, and it is surrounded on both sides by explanation. You can hear a son trying to hold two things at once: the father who kept the household afloat and the father who led men to tear down a house of worship. You can also hear the family arithmetic, three children and the fear of dismissal, that ran through every German household of the period. The answer does not say yes, I am atoning. It does not say no. It explains, judges, and qualifies.
It would be too neat to read the billion euros of regional philanthropy as reparation, and Hopp has never invited that reading. What can be said is narrower. The man who later spent decades paying for clinics, schools, sports pitches, and dementia-care equipment in the towns around Hoffenheim grew up in a village where his father's name was attached to the worst thing that ever happened there. In 2015, a reporter from Deutsche Welle asked about his links to the place. "I was born in Hoffenheim in 1940," Hopp said. The birth records say Heidelberg. He was claiming the village anyway, the whole of it.
Night shifts on other people's machines
The founding of SAP is usually told as a story of rejection, and the first version of the rejection belongs to Xerox. In 1971 Xerox left the computer-hardware business and asked IBM to migrate its business systems onto IBM technology. As part of IBM's compensation, it received the rights to a software repository from Scientific Data Systems. A group of IBM engineers in the region around Mannheim was building an enterprise-wide system on that software when they were told it would no longer be needed. Five of them decided not to let the work die. Hopp had joined IBM Deutschland in 1966, fresh from a telecommunications engineering degree at Karlsruhe. He spent two years as a software developer in Stuttgart, then went to the Mannheim office in 1968 as a systems consultant, one of the people who sat across from customers and translated what they needed into what a mainframe could do. In 1972 he left with Hasso Plattner, Klaus Tschira, Hans-Werner Hector, and Claus Wellenreuther. The company they registered, in Weinheim, as a civil-law partnership, was called Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung: System Analysis and Program Development. Not a name built for posterity.
They started with nine employees. Their first customer was the German branch of Imperial Chemical Industries in Östringen, a few kilometres from Hoffenheim, which needed payroll and accounting programs for its mainframe. The founders made a technical decision that became a business model. IBM's approach was to batch data on punch cards and process them overnight. They stored data so it could be processed immediately, with a common logical database across functions. They called the result "real-time," and the R stayed in the product names for a quarter century: R/1, R/2, R/3. They also built the ICI programs so they could be sold, largely unchanged, to the next customer. That was the bet: standard software, at a time when every large company assumed its accounting was too particular for anything but bespoke code.
The bet required a peculiar way of working. SAP owned no computers. Its programs had to be tested on the customers' mainframes, and the customers were using them during the day. So the founders developed software by day and tested it by night, on borrowed machines in other companies' darkened data centers.
"If I think of the first ten, twelve years of SAP, that was brutally much work," Hopp told the Süddeutsche Zeitung. "Above all, the night work was hard." It added up to 80-hour weeks. Rüdiger, listening, added that his brother had also worked enormously on weekends.
Rüdiger had a particular right to say so. He had also worked at IBM, and Dietmar had asked him to co-found SAP. He said no. "It was clear to me that it would be a terrible grind," he said, using the Ruhr-dialect word Maloche, the word for coal-face labour. "Dietmar was always industrious and very resilient. I, on the other hand, got bouts of depression when I was supposed to do nothing but work. I wanted a proper family life, with evenings off and free weekends." Two brothers, one air rifle saved for over two years, one IBM, one offer on the table. One said yes to the grind and became one of the richest men in Europe. The other said no and kept his weekends. The interview does not settle which choice was wiser.
What Hopp says he did in those early years is telling. "I did the Mannschaftsaufstellung back then, and the entire organization," he said later. Mannschaftsaufstellung is a football word: the team sheet, the starting eleven. Plattner was the product visionary. Tschira built the ABAP language that SAP programs would be written in for decades. Hopp picked the team. He decided who played where.
The numbers that follow come from SAP's own history. Revenue in the first fiscal year was 620,000 Deutschmarks, and the company was profitable from the start. The first commercial product, the RF financial accounting system, shipped in 1973. In 1976 a sales and support subsidiary was founded under the name that would stick: Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung, Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing. R/2, which extended the system into materials management and production planning, arrived in 1979. By the company's tenth anniversary in 1982, more than 250 firms in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland were running SAP software, revenue was about 24 million marks, and headcount had passed 100 for the first time. That year Claus Wellenreuther, one of the five, left. By 1988 there were roughly 940 employees and 245 million marks in revenue. The GmbH became an Aktiengesellschaft in August, and on 4 November 1988 SAP shares began trading in Frankfurt and Stuttgart. Hopp became chairman of the executive board that October and held the post for a decade.
He ran SAP through its defining bet. R/3 launched on 6 July 1992, a three-tier client–server system that freed SAP from the mainframe and opened it to companies running UNIX and, before long, Windows. In 1995 SAP entered the DAX. In 1996 Bill Gates came to Walldorf, where SAP had moved from Weinheim and where it remains, to mark an agreement to port R/3 to Windows NT. A company that had once borrowed other people's computers at night was now one the world's largest software maker visited in person. In 1998 SAP listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and Hopp moved from the executive board to chair the supervisory board.
He has a two-line explanation for all of it, which he has repeated so often in German interviews that it reads like a family motto: "Man braucht viel Glück und zum richtigen Zeitpunkt die richtige Idee und vollen Einsatz." You need a lot of luck, the right idea at the right moment, and total commitment. It is not false modesty. It is a ledger. Luck goes in one column, timing and idea in the second, and the 80-hour weeks in the third, where you can see them.
Vadder
In Walldorf they called him Vadder Hopp, a Palatine-Baden dialect rendering of "Father Hopp." Employees used it, customers used it, and the regional press used it so freely that the Süddeutsche printed it in a headline without explanation. The nickname covers both the warmth of the culture he built and its limits. The limits are more interesting.
The warmth first. In 1988 a programmer with a senior post, staff responsibility, and signing authority at the conglomerate VEBA applied to SAP on his own initiative, knowing it would mean a step down. He later wrote about his interview with Hopp on a personal blog. It went easily. They bonded over a shared pleasure in clever macro-assembler programming and a feel for business logic. The offer came before the interview ended, on attractive terms. Then Hopp personally walked him through the building, showing him the new data center and the translators' rooms. Forty multilingual staff already worked in that department, and Hopp, the writer remembered, mentioned the number "not without pride." The CEO of a company about to go public did his own recruiting tour and was proudest of the translators. Forty people turning German accounting logic into other languages was, for Hopp, the visible proof that a firm from northern Baden intended to sell to the world.
"I never liked hierarchies," he told manager magazin in 2008, speaking of Hoffenheim but describing SAP as well. He has also said he never attended a management course or read a management book. Accounts of SAP's early culture stress a flat organization: hard work, teamwork, openness, speed, and room to fail and try again. Hopp described the transferable lesson to Die Welt in modest terms: "What can be transferred is the attempt to spur people to performance through humanity and understanding."
Now the limit. In early 2006, a group of employees at SAP's Walldorf headquarters moved to elect a Betriebsrat, a works council, the statutory employee body that German companies of SAP's size were long expected to have and that SAP had operated without since 1972. Hopp was 65, had left the executive board seven years earlier, and still held nearly ten percent of the company. He wrote a personal letter to the employees invited to the assembly. He said the prospect left him "in great concern for the future of SAP." He warned that such a body would end up staffed by "people of yesterday," union officials from IG Metall rather than employees who understood the business. In an interview he went further: "Then it may well happen that one day, possibly very quickly, the headquarters is no longer in Walldorf." SAP, he suggested, might move to America.
The Süddeutsche pointed out that he had confused the works council with the supervisory board: a works council is made up only of a company's own employees. The paper also noted that previous attempts had come to nothing. For a man who claimed the village even on his birth certificate, the threat was remarkable. Leave Walldorf. The paternal culture had a paternal condition attached: the family stays a family on the father's terms.
It did not stay that way. In 2022, SAP employees in Germany elected 45 representatives to the SAP SE Works Council, 15 of them from the Ver.di and IG Metall union lists, representing 17,000 employees. The "people of yesterday" arrived in the end, as they generally do at companies with 100,000 employees, and SAP did not move to America. The dispute did not end with SAP, either. In 2024 the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, funded entirely by Hopp's co-founder, was widely criticized for paying a law firm around €200,000 while employees tried to form a works council there. The founders' allergy to the institution had outlived their time running the company.
None of this cancels the warmth. It qualifies it. Fathers are not elected.
The ones who left
Five men left IBM in 1972. Their later lives differ in where they ended up.
Claus Wellenreuther left first, in 1982, after a decade. Klaus Tschira, the builder of ABAP, put his fortune into a foundation that by early 2024 held 3.63 percent of SAP and funded science, in Heidelberg and well beyond. Hans-Werner Hector directed his money toward science and mathematics education. Hasso Plattner, the one people outside Germany have heard of, went farthest.
Plattner was born in Berlin in 1944, shortly before the end of the war, the son of an ophthalmologist. He grew up in Bavaria, studied communications engineering at Karlsruhe like Hopp, and joined IBM in Mannheim in 1968. At SAP he was the technical conscience and, in time, its public face. He was co-CEO from 1998 to 2003 and then chaired the supervisory board for 21 years, until 15 May 2024, playing an influential role in governance that included orchestrating the appointment of co-CEOs Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein in 2019. His philanthropy is international. He founded the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam in 1998 and gave $35 million to found the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, the d.school. He paid $110.7 million at Sotheby's in 2019 for one of Monet's Meules, then a record for an Impressionist work at auction, for the museum he founded in Potsdam. He became the San Jose Sharks' representative on the National Hockey League's board of governors in 2013, after buying out two partners in the team's ownership group. He sails maxi yachts across the Pacific, owns golf courses in South Africa and California, and lives in San Jose, which he calls his adopted home. He has said he has not been back to Germany since leaving SAP.
Hopp stayed. He lives in Walldorf. His foundation operates exclusively in the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region, a cluster of towns from Ludwigshafen to Sinsheim. Its own records show that by 2011 its activities touched more than 80 municipalities in that area. His golf club is in St. Leon-Rot, one town over from SAP's headquarters. He backed the construction of the SAP Arena in Mannheim, home of the Adler Mannheim ice hockey team, whose operations his son Daniel now manages, along with the arena, the golf club, and the foundation. Asked by Die Welt whether he would move to Monaco to escape German taxes, he said: "I would stay here, even if I had to pay 80 percent tax." He was not, the paper noted, a supporter of higher taxes on high earners. He was simply not leaving.
There are a few concessions to the wider world: a luxury golf resort near Cannes, Domaine de Terre Blanche, which the family bought from Sean Connery and which his son Oliver runs; an estate in Florida, where he spends the winters; and, more recently, ownership of Académico de Viseu, a Portuguese club. These are holiday places. The investments that carry his name are local, and so is the stadium.
The contrast is not a judgment, since both men gave generously, but it shows a difference in how they lived. Plattner's money went where the ideas were: Stanford, Potsdam, Cape Town. Hopp's money went where he grew up. Plattner speaks of software and in-memory databases. Hopp, asked what he wanted, told WirtschaftsWoche, "I want to give something back to the region here." The magazine added that he meant it seriously.
— Rüdiger Hopp, on declining his brother's invitation to co-found SAP (translated from German)It was clear to me that it would be a terrible grind. Dietmar was always industrious and very resilient. I, on the other hand, got bouts of depression when I was supposed to do nothing but work and had to. I wanted a proper family life, with evenings off and free weekends.
Forty-six binders
At the end of February 2002, some 20 officials from the Mannheim public prosecutor's office searched Dietmar Hopp's private home and several offices. They left with 46 binders of files. "One had the impression I was a serious criminal," he told manager magazin shortly afterwards. The phrase in German, Schwerverbrecher, is not one a man in Walldorf expects to hear applied to himself.
The case concerned a guarantee. Bernhard Termühlen, chief executive of the Heidelberg financial services firm MLP, where Hopp sat on the supervisory board, had asked Hopp for security because Termühlen wanted to guarantee loans for his own advisers. They had bought MLP shares on credit and got into trouble when the share price collapsed. Hopp provided a guarantee worth millions from the funds of his charitable foundation. The prosecutors, who were already investigating MLP for suspected accounting fraud, suspected Hopp of breach of trust toward the foundation.
His account of what he had done is the account of a man who checked his own books. The foundation, he said, had received the guarantee commission: "I wanted to do the foundation some good." The foundation was doubly secured. He had signed a Patronatserklärung, a letter of comfort, making himself personally liable with his entire private fortune. He had also taken four million of Termühlen's MLP shares as collateral. He said his representatives had tried to show the letter to the investigators during the search, and that the investigators refused. He called the whole operation a Schildbürgerstreich, a fool's errand, after the citizens of a proverbial German town who carried sunlight into their windowless town hall in sacks. He said the chief prosecutor enjoyed issuing press releases. He said he would sue.
He resigned from the MLP supervisory board effective 17 June 2002. In July the investigation was dropped, on exactly the grounds he had given: the letter of comfort meant the foundation could not have suffered a loss, so there could be no breach of trust. He did not sue. A claim for damages would take years, he explained, "and the costs would have to be paid by the taxpayers. That would hit the wrong people."
That is the episode in brief, with one more detail. In 2004 he set up a foundation called Pro Justitia. The Süddeutsche explained it in a clause: he saw himself as someone persecuted by the justice system. A man who had once kept a jar of liver sausage for every goal now kept forty-six binders' worth of grievance and built an institution around it. It is the same habit applied to an injury rather than a gift. Whatever the world does to him, Hopp makes a permanent structure out of it.
One jar per goal
"With that, I was practically the club's first professional," Hopp told Die Welt in 2008, aged 68, about the liver sausage. A farmer in Hoffenheim who loved football, and knew the young striker loved homemade pâté, gave him a jar for every goal. Hopp took them back to his student dormitory in Karlsruhe, where his friends were delighted when he returned with one jar, two, or, rarely, three. The first professional contract in TSG Hoffenheim's history was paid in sausage, and the payment was shared out at a dormitory table in a university town.
He kept his ties to the club after he stopped playing. In 1990, after what he called a sportlicher Rückschlag, a sporting setback, he decided to support it. "I did not start in 1990 with the aim of one day playing in the Bundesliga with TSG Hoffenheim," he told WirtschaftsWoche in 2009, when the club was top of the table. The early money was "relatively modest," and it went first to youth football. "Hoffenheim had practically no youth team back then." The youth work was so successful, he said, "that the senior team had to follow in order to serve as a role model for the young people." The first team rose so the boys would have something to look up to.
It is worth taking the claim at face value, because the record supports at least the order of events. The club rose from the eighth tier to the third between 1990 and 2001. In 1999, for the club's centenary, a stadium was finished on the site of the old sports ground and clubhouse, privately financed by the patron and named after him. The Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion seated 5,000, 1,620 of them under cover, and opened with a friendly against Bayern Munich, which Hoffenheim lost 1–4. Four promotions were celebrated there after 2000. In the Regionalliga season of 2005–06 the average home crowd was about 2,000.
In 2005 Hopp sharply increased his spending, with a plan. "The Bundesliga master plan was designed for a period of five years," he told manager magazin. A large part of it was Ralf Rangnick, a demanding, system-obsessed coach who had taken Schalke 04 into the Champions League and who now had access to players no other club at that level could afford. Hopp explained the choice in terms of temperament: "Herr Rangnick has a similar philosophy of leading people as I do." In 2007 the stadium was expanded to 6,350 places to meet second-division requirements, and the average crowd rose to 3,000. Hoffenheim went up to the 2. Bundesliga that spring. In May 2008, in the last league match ever played by the first team at the stadium bearing his name, they won promotion to the Bundesliga. The five-year plan had taken two.
"Not at the start of the season, not in the middle of the season," Hopp said when asked if he had expected it, "but in the last six weeks I hoped it would work out." Asked whether success in football could be planned like success in business, he made a distinction he would come back to: "A lot is plannable, above all performance is plannable. But success in sport depends on many factors. Every shot that hits the post shows that."
The first Bundesliga season belonged to a tale nobody had expected. Playing the first half of the 2008–09 season at the Carl-Benz-Stadion in Mannheim while a 30,000-seat arena was finished beside the A6 near Sinsheim, the village club went top of the league. Its striker was Vedad Ibišević, then 24. He was a refugee from Bosnia whose family had gone to Switzerland for ten months and, when they could not get papers to stay, to St. Louis under a UN program. He had arrived there at 16, discovered that his school English did not cover American slang, and played wherever he could, sometimes just with kids in the street, while all he could see, he said, were baseball and American football fields. By early December he had 17 Bundesliga goals and the New York Times was calling the upcoming visit to Bayern at the Allianz Arena a David-and-Goliath match, "the team from a small village (population 3,000) that has been bankrolled by the software mogul Dietmar Hopp." Hopp watched that match on television at his estate in Florida. Die Welt noted he did not need to be in public view.
Then Ibišević was injured. Hopp, asked by WirtschaftsWoche that winter whether he let himself think about the championship, answered with a candour unusual among owners: "Of course I thought about what it would be like once, but then very quickly stopped thinking. Because it is simply out of the question." The striker had been der Vollstrecker, the executioner, with 18 goals and eight assists, and he was very hard to replace. "A dream for me would be if we reached fifth place and played in the UEFA Cup." The village had no town-hall balcony for a title celebration, and Hopp said that was his smallest worry: "But one won't need it."
The club moved into the Rhein-Neckar-Arena in January 2009 and has stayed in the Bundesliga ever since. In 2015 Hopp received an exemption from the German Football League's 50+1 rule, which normally prevents a single investor from holding majority control of a club, and from 1 July that year Hoffenheim belonged to him.
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From Kreisliga to Bundesliga
How a village club became the most controversial project in German football.
1954
A 14-year-old Hopp watches the World Cup final on Hoffenheim's only television, in the Ratskeller, nursing one lemonade.
1957
At 17, Hopp plays for TSG Hoffenheim's first team on a doctor's special dispensation.
1990
After a sporting setback, Hopp begins funding the club, starting with youth football.
1999
The privately financed Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion opens for the club's centenary with a 1–4 friendly loss to Bayern.
2005
Investment sharply increased; Ralf Rangnick hired; five-year Bundesliga plan begins.
2007
Promotion to the 2. Bundesliga; stadium expanded to 6,350 places.
2008
Promotion to the Bundesliga in the final first-team match at the Dietmar-Hopp-Stadion. Same year: Dortmund fans first display Hopp in crosshairs.
2009
The club moves into the 30,000-seat Rhein-Neckar-Arena near Sinsheim.
2015
Exemption from the 50+1 rule; Hopp takes majority ownership on July 1.
2020
Bayern and Hoffenheim stop competing for the final 13 minutes in protest at banners targeting Hopp.
What is tradition?
The hatred started early and found its symbol quickly. In 2008, the year Hoffenheim reached the Bundesliga, Borussia Dortmund supporters displayed a banner with Hopp's face in the crosshairs of a sniper's rifle. Hans-Joachim Watzke, Dortmund's chief executive, warned against "test-tube clubs" and asked the league to look into Hoffenheim. In 2011 the conflict escalated when it emerged that visiting Dortmund fans in Sinsheim had been subjected to artificial noise through the public-address system. In 2025, at 85, Hopp told Sport1 that Watzke had "really stirred up trouble against me."
The supporters' case, made in good faith, is not hard to state. German football clubs are mostly member-owned associations, and the 50+1 rule exists to keep them so. A club's place in the top flight is supposed to be earned through a long chain of supporters, decades, relegations, and returns. Hoffenheim, to its critics, skipped the chain. The word for such clubs is Plastikklub, plastic club. It takes, in the phrase Hopp himself quoted back to DW, someone else's place.
Hopp's answer, given at 75 to Deutsche Welle in English translation, is the clearest statement of how he sees the world, and worth quoting at length.
— Dietmar Hopp, to Deutsche Welle, 2015What is tradition? Take Cologne for example. That club is said to have a real history, but it was only founded sixty years ago. Hoffenheim have been around far longer… Give us 10 more years on top, and then we'll probably be able to call ourselves a club with tradition too, because there'll be other clubs around that are younger. I put no stock in that argument, it's a dead end.
The argument is an engineer's. Tradition, on this view, is a quantity: years at a level. Accumulate enough of them and you have it. On the money he was blunter still. "There's not a single team in the Bundesliga that can survive without injections of money. Many get it directly from the state. Others have sold shares to investors… That's the reality and anything else is just a fairytale. In Hoffenheim, everything can be hung on a single person."
The last sentence is the most important, and the most self-aware. Everything can be hung on a single person. The fans who hated him knew perfectly well that Bayern had corporate shareholders and that Volkswagen owned Wolfsburg, and by 2015 the newer target, Red Bull's Leipzig, was absorbing much of their anger. Rangnick, the coach who had taken Hoffenheim up, went on to run Leipzig's football operations. But a corporation is not a person and cannot be put in crosshairs. Hopp could. He was a face, an age, a village, a set of initials that could be coloured blue on a bedsheet. Ultras opposed to the commercialization of football needed someone to stand for it, and the most locally rooted billionaire in Germany became that symbol for German football's commercial era. Fans whose clubs were owned by carmakers called the man who wanted the club he had played for as a boy a mercenary.
By 2020, Deutsche Welle noted, Hoffenheim had not depended on Hopp's money for several years, partly because of income from selling players. The club had become known for developing talent. Its managing director claimed a youth-to-professional conversion rate of 23 percent against an industry norm of three, and Roberto Firmino, Niklas Süle, and the coach Julian Nagelsmann all began their careers there. SAP's own engineers had built a sports-management platform with the club, used by 2024 by 80 clubs and federations in 18 countries. The test-tube club had become, among other things, a laboratory. It made no difference to the banners.
Which brings us back to the rain in Sinsheim and the thirteen minutes. The day was not really about Hoffenheim. It came in the middle of a dispute between ultras and the German football authorities over collective punishments for fan groups, and Hopp, as before, became its symbol. The Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung's longtime chronicler of Hopp called the scene of the two old men holding hands at the touchline "the symbolic image one can't get out of one's head." It is a strong image. Rummenigge, the Bayern executive whose club epitomizes German football's establishment, held hands with the man that establishment's supporters held in contempt, and together they stood against those supporters. Hopp, bewildered, was being comforted by the people he had spent twelve years being compared to.
Five years later, he told Sport1 that in 2022 he had nearly died: he went into the clinic a day early, suffered cardiac arrest there that afternoon, and underwent a six-hour operation. "At home, that would have been my end." He now has a pacemaker. He still attends nearly every home game. "And I still make important decisions." Before Hoffenheim's season opener at Bayer Leverkusen, he added, he had bet on Hoffenheim to win. They did. He laughed.
Guardian of property
In 2000 Hopp put €15 million into a company in Weinheim called Cytonet, which was trying to grow liver cells that might one day make transplants unnecessary. Weinheim, a reporter from Der Spiegel pointed out years later, was where SAP had been founded. "Weinheim? Oh, really?" Hopp said, playing it down, a pure coincidence with no hidden meaning. Then he got up, walked to his computer, and printed out some documents, clearly trying to change the subject. When Cytonet won an innovation prize, the magazine wrote, he beamed "like a father whose child was just awarded the top honors." He was 67 and had already put €320 million into 15 biotech companies, making him Germany's largest individual investor in the sector. He called biotechnology "the new great wave" after information technology.
He had no background in it, and said so. The interest began, he told Die Welt, at an event where a mutual acquaintance had invited two speakers: Hopp on the future of IT, and Friedrich von Bohlen und Halbach, a biochemist and entrepreneur, on the future of medicine. "And I was damned interested in what he was saying." Four years later came their first joint investment. Asked whether he would put a cent into biotech without Bohlen's advice, Hopp gave an answer that founders who become investors rarely give: "Just because I had success at SAP, I don't imagine that I know everything. I wouldn't have invested in the freight-forwarding business on my own either." Bohlen replied, dryly, that he didn't understand freight forwarding either.
With Bohlen and the attorney Christof Hettich, Hopp's long-serving adviser who had first suggested Cytonet, the investments were consolidated in 2005 into a holding company, dievini Hopp BioTech holding, run with a third managing director, Mathias Hothum. The name, manager magazin reported, comes from Baltic mythology and means "guardian of property." The magazine thought that ironic. By mid-2017, the three managing directors had deployed roughly €1.2 billion across 21 companies, and not one euro had come back to Hopp.
The magazine reconstructed the moment the patron said so. It was an autumn meeting of the dievini portfolio companies at the clubhouse of the golf club in St. Leon-Rot, two years before the article appeared. The first evening was pleasant: Italian food in the club restaurant, a talk on managing medical data, chief executives and finance directors from a dozen biotech companies discussing clinical trials and fresh capital over dinner. The next morning Hopp stepped up to the lectern in the conference room. Several attendees could still quote him word for word, and their accounts agreed.
— Dietmar Hopp, to the executives of his biotech portfolio companies, as reported by manager magazin (translated from German)If I had known that it would cost me more than a billion euros to stand here today, I wouldn't have done it.
He softened it with a smile, the magazine noted. The message was clear anyway. He had stopped funding new start-ups some time before. The billion was spent. The sector, perhaps 25,000 high-tech jobs in Germany, owed some of its existence to his patience. Many researchers had stayed in Germany rather than leaving for America because of it. There is a body of literature on why science-based ventures are so hard to finance, Nurturing Science-based Ventures among it, and Hopp had spent a decade paying for that lesson himself.
Then came 2020. One of the companies in the portfolio, CureVac in Tübingen, which by one account Hopp had financed alone from 2006 to 2014 and in which he had brought in Bill Gates as a co-investor, was developing an mRNA vaccine against Covid-19. Reports that spring said the Trump administration had tried to secure the company's work for the United States, and the German federal government took a stake as a shareholder. Hopp's response, posted publicly as the company's main owner, showed that the regional patron could also think globally: if an effective vaccine against the coronavirus could soon be developed, it should "reach, protect and help people not only regionally but in solidarity across the whole world." The Handelsblatt ran a column that summer titled "Germany needs more managers of his kind." CureVac did not deliver the vaccine the country hoped for. The holding's CureVac position was realized in 2025, two decades after entry. In 2017, the guardian of property had little to show for its watch. Eight years later the picture was more mixed, and no reporter could easily attach a single number to it.
The other investments look less like a portfolio than a list of favours. There was a stake in the Henninger brewery that WirtschaftsWoche called a Freundschaftsdienst, a favour to friends, which cost him real money. There was FORCAM, a software company for factory floors, in which he invested in 2004 and took majority control in mid-2019, explaining that "every company is becoming a software company" and that he had been "privileged to play a pivotal role in shaping the era of Industry 3.0 with SAP." There were hotels, a spa, and a golf resort. The magazine called the pattern planlos, planless, compared with Plattner's disciplined focus on software. Hopp's answer was that it was about the jobs, then, quickly, that he looked carefully at every company, and that he did want to make money, perhaps not right away but eventually.
The foundation was planned, and the decision behind it is the most consequential of his life after SAP. In 1995 he established the Dietmar Hopp Stiftung as a non-profit limited company and endowed it with 28 million SAP shares. In 2006 he transferred nearly three-quarters of his SAP stake to it. At the end of 2007, according to an SEC filing, he exercised voting power over 116,273,200 SAP shares, 9.33 percent of the company. Of those, 109,869,200 were held by the foundation. He had given away most of the fortune and kept the vote. The foundation spent €115 million in its first eleven years, passed €290 million by November 2011 and €640 million by March 2018, and crossed a billion by the end of 2020, its 25th year, almost all of it within the Rhine-Neckar region.
What the money bought is surprisingly specific. It pays €1.5 million a year to a stem-cell institute in Heidelberg. It has planned a children's tumor center and a heart center there. Since 2015 it has built 19 outdoor exercise parks, called alla hopp!, a pun on a dialect phrase meaning roughly "come on, let's go," for €45 million, and given them to the towns. It has spent about €1.3 million on 100 interactive light-projection kits, Tovertafel, for homes where people with dementia are cared for. It started Anpfiff ins Leben, "Kick-off into Life," a youth program built on four pillars, sport, school, career, and social life, with the first center opening in 2001. "The state unfortunately has only limited possibilities," he said, explaining why. In 1999 it gave the technical college in Karlsruhe 2.5 million marks, including money for a teaching assistant to run its SAP R/3 lab. He was paying to train future SAP programmers at the university where he had kept his liver sausage. In 2014 it set up a climate foundation for citizens. Anyone who reads these grants learns about a region: its cancer wards, its gymnasiums, its villages with old people and not enough benches.
In 2018 the old team-picker gave the laudation when Karlsruhe gave Hasso Plattner an honorary doctorate, standing in a lecture hall both men had studied in during the 1960s and recalling their beginnings in the "North Baden Silicon Valley." One of the five had gone to San Jose. One had stayed at home and given that home the label.
The stadium in Hoffenheim still bears his name. Since 2008 its home team has been the reserves, the women's side, and the youth teams, the boys the first team was originally meant to inspire. In 2022 its official address changed from Silbergasse 45 to Peter-Hofmann-Weg 3. Walk from the station, fifteen or twenty minutes. Pass the two banks, the lottery kiosk, the bakery with the jogging bread, and the church. At Metzgerei Geiser they still sell hausgemachte Dosenwurst, homemade sausage in a jar, the same thing a farmer once handed a teenage striker for every goal.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows does not prescribe how to become Dietmar Hopp. Nobody should try, and the conditions that made him, a postwar village, a rejected IBM project, the gap between mainframes and client–server, will not recur. It is a set of patterns that appear repeatedly across five decades and four ventures: a software company, a football club, a biotech holding, and a regional foundation. Some are virtues. A few are warnings disguised as virtues. Hopp's life supports both readings.
The Principles
- 1.Build the first customer's product so you can sell it to the second.
- 2.Run on other people's idle capacity.
- 3.Pick the team sheet yourself.
- 4.Flatten the hierarchy, then audit your own reflex to defend it.
- 5.Plan performance, not outcomes.
- 6.Fund the youth team first.
- 7.Hire for shared philosophy, not just résumé.
- 8.Know the borders of your competence and rent judgment beyond them.
- 9.Separate ownership from control, early and deliberately.
- 10.Make your trustworthiness legible to outsiders, not just to yourself.
- 11.Concentrate geographically until you can see the effects.
- 12.Treat legitimacy as a function of time, and pay the interest.
Principle 1
Build the first customer's product so you can sell it to the second
SAP's first engagement, payroll and accounting for ICI in Östringen, could have been ordinary consulting: build bespoke code, bill for it, go to the next client and start again. Instead the founders designed the ICI software as a standalone package that could be offered "to other interested parties." The first customer paid for the product's development, and every later customer paid for its reuse. That is why SAP ended its first year with 620,000 marks in revenue and was profitable from the start, and why ten years later more than 250 companies were running essentially the same system.
The distinction sounds obvious and is hard to keep. Every large customer argues that its processes are unique, and every early-stage company is tempted to agree, because agreeing produces a signed contract. Hopp's SAP bet in the other direction: business processes were more alike than executives believed, and a well-designed standard would beat a tailored one on cost, maintainability, and eventually on quality. That bet, the founding wager of the standard-software industry, carried SAP from Östringen to 98 of the world's 100 largest companies.
Tactic: On every custom engagement, track how much of what you build could be sold unchanged to the next customer, and refuse work where the answer is close to zero.
Principle 2
Run on other people's idle capacity
SAP owned no mainframes. The founders wrote code by day and tested it at night on customers' machines while those machines sat idle. That meant 80-hour weeks and the specific misery of night work, which Hopp still singled out decades later. It also meant a software company could reach production quality without the capital cost of the hardware it depended on.
In general terms: the scarcest resource early in a company's life is the expensive asset everyone assumes you need. Hopp's answer was to find who already owned that asset and when they were not using it. The cost was paid in sleep and in Rüdiger's Maloche. Note the trade-off. Running on borrowed capacity is cheap in money and expensive in human endurance, and Hopp's brother, who declined, is the reminder that not everyone should take that trade.
Tactic: Before raising money for an asset, list who already owns it and when it sits idle, then negotiate for those hours.
Principle 3
Pick the team sheet yourself
"I did the team lineup back then, and the entire organization," Hopp said of SAP's early years. His word, Mannschaftsaufstellung, comes from the dressing room, and it fits his role. Among five founders he was not the one most identified with the product's architecture. That was Plattner, and in the programming language, Tschira. He was the one who decided who played where. Years later, as chief executive, he still recruited personally, still walked candidates through the building, and still measured progress in people: forty translators, mentioned with pride.
Founders often treat organizational design as administration to be delegated once the "real" work of product and sales is under way. Hopp treated it as the real work. At Hoffenheim he did the same with one decisive appointment, Rangnick, and otherwise kept out of the dressing room. The pattern is consistent: the founder's leverage is in choosing who does the job, not in doing it.
Tactic: Keep final say over the first twenty hires personally, and spend more hours on who fills a role than on defining what the role is.
Principle 4
Flatten the hierarchy, then audit your own reflex to defend it
Hopp built SAP flat and said so plainly: "I never liked hierarchies." The flat culture produced loyalty, speed, and a recruiting pitch strong enough to persuade a VEBA executive to accept a demotion. It also produced the nickname Vadder, and with it the expectation that the father knows best.
The 2006 letter against a works council shows the hidden cost of a culture organized around a founder's personality. Hopp, in "great concern for the future of SAP," threatened that headquarters might leave Walldorf, and the regional press noted he had confused the body employees wanted with a different one. The paternal flat organization tends to treat any formal representation as betrayal, when at 100,000 employees formal representation is usually just administration. SAP later got its works council, unions included, and stayed in Walldorf. A playbook should record both halves: the culture worked, and its founder misread what would have to change as the company grew.
⚖
Two models of the founder's culture
What flat-and-paternal does well, and where it breaks.
| Dimension | Founder-led flat culture | Where it strains |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiting | CEO's personal tour; offer made in the room | Does not scale past the founder's calendar |
| Risk-taking | Freedom to fail and try another approach | Relies on informal trust rather than written rights |
| Employee voice | Direct access to the founders | Formal representation feels like betrayal: the 2006 letter |
| Legitimacy | "Vadder" earns deference | Deference outlasts the founder's operating role |
Tactic: Write down now the employee-governance structures you would accept at ten times your current headcount, so that when someone proposes them you are judging the idea and not your own nostalgia.
Principle 5
Plan performance, not outcomes
Asked whether football success could be planned like business success, Hopp drew a careful line: "A lot is plannable, above all performance is plannable. But success in sport depends on many factors. Every shot that hits the post shows that." Fitness, training, and discipline can be planned. A championship cannot. He applied it to himself, too: when Hoffenheim led the Bundesliga, he admitted to imagining the title and then "very quickly stopped thinking," because losing his striker made it unrealistic, and he set his ambition at fifth place.
The useful habit here is not modesty. The five-year Bundesliga plan was ambitious and was completed in two. The habit is keeping two ledgers apart: what you control, preparation, personnel, money, and process, and what you don't, the post, the injury, the referee. Founders who blend the two either take credit for luck or blame themselves for it. Hopp's own success formula, luck plus timing and idea plus total commitment, keeps them apart.
Tactic: Write separate plans for the inputs you control and the outcomes you want, and judge your team only on the first.
Principle 6
Fund the youth team first
Hopp's money in 1990 went to a club that "had practically no youth team," and it went to the youth first. By his account, the first team's rise followed from the youth program's success: it "had to follow in order to serve as a role model." The same order runs through his philanthropy. The foundation's youth sports program starts in kindergartens. Anpfiff ins Leben treats teenage athletes as whole people, with schooling and careers. The Karlsruhe grant aimed to interest schoolchildren in technical degrees.
The business lesson concerns building a pipeline before you need its output. A first team bought on the transfer market rents results. A youth program owns them, which is part of why Hoffenheim, by 2020, no longer depended on its patron's money and could fund itself by developing and selling players. The investment is slow, unglamorous, and easy to cut in a bad year. It is also how a club stops being an "artificial construct" and gradually becomes the thing its critics say it lacks.
Tactic: Put a fixed share of every year's budget into developing people you will not need for three years, and protect it from cuts.
Hopp's explanation of why he chose Ralf Rangnick did not mention tactics or trophies first. "Herr Rangnick has a similar philosophy of leading people as I do. That was certainly one of the reasons to engage him and one of the reasons for the promotion." Rangnick's résumé, a Champions League campaign with Schalke, was necessary. What decided it was that the coach would lead the way the owner would have.
When an owner cannot be in the dressing room, the most important hire is the one who will make a thousand decisions the owner never sees. Agreement on values does more for those decisions than any reporting structure. It is also why Hopp could tell manager magazin the club had "no hierarchies," only a managing director, a coach, and "above all a network." A network works only when its nodes already agree on how to behave.
Tactic: In final-round interviews for your most autonomous roles, ask candidates how they would handle three real people problems from your history, and hire the one whose answers you would have given.
Principle 8
Know the borders of your competence and rent judgment beyond them
"Just because I had success at SAP, I don't imagine that I know everything." Hopp entered biotech only after Friedrich von Bohlen's talk and then only alongside him. He took Cytonet at the suggestion of his attorney, Christof Hettich. He put the sector's capital into a structure run by three managing directors with domain expertise. The freight-forwarding joke makes the same point as a rule: success in one field is not a license to act alone in another.
The honest coda is that renting judgment does not guarantee returns. By 2017 dievini had deployed €1.2 billion without a euro coming back, and Hopp told his own portfolio executives he would not have done it had he known the price. The principle does not say expert partners eliminate losses. It says that without them the losses would have been bigger and less instructive. A founder who becomes an investor gains the most from people who know where he is ignorant.
Tactic: Before deploying capital in a new domain, find one practitioner whose judgment you would defer to over your own, and make their agreement a condition of every check.
Principle 9
Separate ownership from control, early and deliberately
In 1995, still in his prime, Hopp endowed a foundation with 28 million SAP shares. In 2006 he moved nearly three-quarters of his SAP stake into it. At the end of 2007, SEC filings show the foundation holding 109,869,200 shares, while Hopp kept voting and dispositive power over the whole 9.33 percent block. He gave away the economic interest and kept the vote: the money flowed to the region while the stake remained a stable anchor for the company.
The design accomplished several things at once. It committed most of his fortune to public purposes irreversibly and early, rather than through an estate after his death. It kept a founder-aligned shareholder in place as SAP's free float grew. It gave the foundation a dividend stream that paid out more than a billion euros over 25 years. Whatever one thinks of large private foundations in general, and German public television has investigated how the very wealthy use them, the timing is notable. He did not wait for retirement to decide where the money would go. He decided at 55.
Tactic: Decide the eventual destination of your equity while you are still building, and put it into a structure that makes the decision hard to reverse.
Principle 10
Make your trustworthiness legible to outsiders, not just to yourself
The 2002 MLP affair is a lesson in the difference between being safe and looking safe. By Hopp's account, and by the prosecutors' eventual decision, the foundation's guarantee for Bernhard Termühlen was fully protected: a personal letter of comfort covering his entire private fortune, plus four million MLP shares as collateral, plus a fee paid to the foundation. Legally, the foundation could not lose. Even so, his home was searched by twenty officials and 46 binders were taken away, because from outside the arrangement looked like a supervisory-board member using charity money to help a friend at a company under investigation.
Hopp's anger was understandable, and his refusal to sue, on the grounds that taxpayers would pay, was gracious. The operational lesson is earlier and duller. When you mix roles, here benefactor, board member, and friend, the burden of proof moves to you, and the evidence has to be visible before anyone asks. A letter of comfort that the investigators had not seen did nothing to stop the search.
!
The MLP guarantee: what was safe and what was visible
How a legally sound arrangement still led to a search warrant.
| Element | Substance | Visibility |
|---|---|---|
| Guarantee from foundation funds | Risk Charity assets exposed to a third party's credit | Public once the investigation began |
| Commission paid to foundation | Sound Foundation compensated for risk | Low |
| Personal letter of comfort | Sound Hopp personally liable with full fortune | Risk Investigators did not accept it during the search |
| 4M MLP shares as collateral | Partial Collateral in the troubled issuer's own stock | Low |
Tactic: Whenever you act in more than one capacity in a transaction, document the safeguards in a form an outsider will see before any question is raised.
Principle 11
Concentrate geographically until you can see the effects
Hopp's foundation gives only to the Rhine-Neckar region. Its grants have gone to cancer research and stem cells in Heidelberg, exercise parks in 19 towns, dementia homes, a hospice, and village sports clubs. Concentration lets a donor see results: he could visit the stem-cell lab, attend the junior teams' games, and drive past the alla hopp! parks. It also lets money compound, because a clinic, a school, and a youth center in the same region reinforce each other in ways scattered grants do not.
Compare Plattner, whose giving reaches Stanford, Potsdam, and Cape Town and is excellent in its own way. Neither approach is wrong. But Hopp's version is unusual among the very rich and teaches something a global portfolio cannot: when you concentrate, you hear about your mistakes quickly, from neighbours. The same proximity explains the hatred. Nobody puts a distant philanthropist in crosshairs. The cost of being seen is part of the price.
Tactic: Pick a footprint small enough that you could personally visit every project you fund in a year, and decline anything outside it.
Principle 12
Treat legitimacy as a function of time, and pay the interest
Hopp's argument about tradition, that Cologne's club is younger than Hoffenheim's and that ten more years at the top would earn Hoffenheim the label, treats legitimacy as accumulated time. It is half right. Time does convert novelty into institution: SAP was once five defectors from IBM in Weinheim, and became the definition of a German blue chip. Hoffenheim has now played more than fifteen consecutive Bundesliga seasons.
The other half is what the banners showed. Time builds legitimacy only if you keep paying something while it accrues: performance, youth development, restraint, and the willingness to absorb abuse without retaliating. Hopp paid much of that and also made mistakes, such as the noise piped at visiting Dortmund fans in 2011, which set the account back years. The principle is to treat a skeptical public's acceptance as a long-term debt, serviced steadily and never assumed settled.
Tactic: If you are entering an established field as an outsider, budget explicitly for years of resentment, and judge yourself on whether you are still there and still behaving well a decade later.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Dietmar Hopp, to the Süddeutsche Zeitung (translated from German)You need a lot of luck, the right idea at the right moment, and total commitment. If I think of the first ten, twelve years of SAP, that was brutally much work. Above all, the night work was hard.
— Dietmar Hopp, on his beginnings at SAPI have never attended a management course and never read a management book.
— Dietmar Hopp, to Deutsche Welle, 2015There's not a single team in the Bundesliga that can survive without injections of money. Many get it directly from the state. Others have sold shares to investors… That's the reality and anything else is just a fairytale.
— Dietmar Hopp, to Die Welt (translated from German)Just because I had success at SAP, I don't imagine that I know everything. I wouldn't have invested in the freight-forwarding business on my own either.
— Dietmar Hopp, to manager magazin, on football and business (translated from German)A lot is plannable, above all performance is plannable. But success in sport depends on many factors. Every shot that hits the post shows that.
Maxims
- Sell the second copy. Build the first customer's solution so that the next customer can buy it unchanged.
- Borrow the dark hours. Before you buy an expensive asset, find whoever owns it and ask what they do with it at night.
- The founder picks the team. Your leverage is in who plays where, more than in playing.
- Flat is a promise, not a weapon. A flat culture loses its point when it is used to fend off the people it was meant to serve.
- Plan the training, not the trophy. Performance is plannable; the post is not.
- Youth first, first team second. A pipeline you own outlasts a lineup you rent.
- Rent judgment at your borders. Success in one field confers ignorance in every other.
- Give it away while you are building. Deciding where the money goes at 55 is a different act from deciding at 85.
- Make safeguards visible. If outsiders cannot see that an arrangement is safe, it will be treated as unsafe.
- Stay where they can see you. Rootedness makes your work visible and your failures personal; accept both, or go somewhere else.
