About Ballesterer

Ballesterer

Ballesterer is an Austrian football magazine published in Vienna in the German language. It is an independent, club-neutral magazine devoted not to results and league tables in the first instance, but to football culture and fan culture, and to the cultural, economic, political and scholarly world that surrounds the game. It appears ten times a year, is published by its own publishing company, and has been in existence since the spring of 2000, which makes it one of the longest-lived football-culture magazines in the German-speaking world. Its print circulation was given as 20,000 copies in its 2020 media data, and it is sold across the Austrian magazine trade, in German railway-station bookshops and at selected sales outlets in Switzerland.

The name itself is part of the magazine's argument about football history. Ballesterer, stressed on the second syllable, is an old Austrian expression for a footballer. It appears to date from Vienna in the interwar period, an early golden age of Austrian football, and the Viennese Sport-Tagblatt was already writing of Ballesterer and Fußballesterer in 1926. By choosing that word rather than a modern marketing name, the founders signalled from the start that the magazine would treat football as something with a past, a vocabulary and a social life of its own, and not simply as a weekly sequence of fixtures to be reported and forgotten.

Founding by Students in Vienna in 2000

The magazine was founded in Vienna in the spring of 2000. Its long-serving editor Reinhard Krennhuber produced the first issue in March 2000 together with Klaus Federmair, Robert Hummer and Florin Mittermayr. The idea for a special-interest football medium grew out of a seminar paper Krennhuber had written for his journalism and communication studies, so the common description of the magazine as a student project is broadly accurate, although it is more precise to say that it grew out of university work than that it was a formal university publication. Its declared model was the English football magazine When Saturday Comes, the pioneering British title that had shown since the 1980s that supporters could write intelligently, critically and humorously about their own game.

The beginnings were deliberately modest. Issue one was produced as a black-and-white laser copy in a print run of 300 copies and was sold for 25 Austrian schillings, in the last period before the euro replaced the schilling in everyday cash use. After a creative pause, the magazine began to appear regularly every three months from September 2001. That slow start matters to its later identity. Ballesterer was not launched by a large publishing house with a market study behind it; it was made by fans and young writers, distributed in small numbers, and allowed to grow only as fast as its readership grew.

Growth, Frequency and the Move to Ten Issues a Year

Greater recognition and a rising circulation changed both the look and the rhythm of the magazine. From issue 17 in May 2005 it was printed entirely in colour. From December 2005 until October 2008 it appeared every two months, and since October 2008 it has appeared ten times a year, on a broadly monthly rhythm interrupted by two double issues. The seed listing that places it in the monthly section of the Austrian magazine list is therefore understandable, but ten times a year is the accurate description of its frequency.

The physical magazine grew with its audience. The first issue had 32 pages; the extent rose first to around 50 pages and then further, and from October 2002 to November 2013 an issue normally ran to 68 pages. Longer special editions appeared for the European Championship of 2008, hosted by Austria and Switzerland, and for the magazine's tenth anniversary in March 2010. A larger step came with a relaunch in November 2013, since when an issue has normally had 84 pages. Until issue 85 in the autumn of 2013 the brand name and logo still carried the suffix fm, a play on the trademark symbol that stood for Fußballmagazin; it was then dropped, leaving the single word Ballesterer.

Publisher, Ownership and the People Behind the Magazine

Ballesterer has always been self-published, which is central to its independence. For a long time it operated as an association. With issue 46 in 2009 its economic activities were transferred to a limited company, and the media owner since 2011 is given as ballesterer Zeitschriftenverlag GmbH. The publisher, in the Austrian sense of Herausgeber, is the association ballesterer – Verein zur offensiven Erweiterung des Fußballhorizonts, the association for the offensive broadening of the football horizon, a name that captures the project's mixture of seriousness and self-irony. Co-founder Reinhard Krennhuber has since stepped back from the editorial team but remains a board member of that association.

Editorial leadership has changed gradually rather than abruptly. From 2012 the editors-in-chief were Jakob Rosenberg and Nicole Selmer, and since the summer of 2024 Nicole Selmer and Moritz Ablinger have served as co-editors-in-chief. Around the core editorial team, including layout and photography responsibilities and regular contributors, of roughly 30 people, the magazine draws on a large pool of occasional authors. By its tenth anniversary, more than 300 people had contributed texts, photographs, graphics and other work to it, for a long time without payment. Ballesterer describes itself, in effect, as a collective project that has always depended substantially on voluntary work by people who are football fans first.

Content and the Long Thematic Focus

The signature device of the magazine is its Schwerpunkt, its thematic focus. Unlike a conventional cover story, a focus is usually developed over about 16 pages, making it by far the longest element in the issue, and it combines essays, reportage and interviews on a single subject. The range of subjects illustrates the editorial breadth: personalities such as Ernst Happel, Roberto Baggio and Martin Hinteregger; social and political themes such as economic crisis, climate change and integration; and focuses on fan scenes and their concerns, for example the sometimes problematic treatment of supporters by the police.

Alongside the focus, regular contents include commentaries, reviews, photo features, puzzles and groundhopping reports. In the groundhopping pieces the match itself is deliberately not the centre of attention; the stadium visit and the writer's subjective experience of place, travel and crowd are. A certain fame also attached to the column Notfallambulanz, the emergency clinic, in which the doctor and author Wolfgang Pennwieser explained medical problems from the football world in humorous form. Guest and regular contributors have included the journalist Samo Kobenter and, with columns, the cabaret artist Dirk Stermann, which underlines how far the magazine's author base reaches beyond conventional sports reporting.

Editorial Character: Critical, Anti-Discriminatory and Close to the Terraces

Ballesterer is explicitly a magazine for football and fan culture that is independent of any club. Where traditional sports reporting puts results and table positions at the centre, Ballesterer puts fans, players and the game's surroundings at the centre. It engages critically with the commercialisation of modern football, returns repeatedly to ultra culture and to the pushing back of fans and fan culture from stadiums, and adopts as part of its editorial line an outspoken stance against discrimination, including sexism, racism and homophobia. The Viennese daily Der Standard has described it as a magazine for the marginal aspects of the mass sport, a description the magazine's makers have generally treated as a compliment rather than an insult.

That closeness to organised fan scenes has also brought criticism. Critics have at times accused the magazine of standing too near to those scenes and of not keeping enough distance from phenomena such as hooliganism. The makers, who themselves regularly stand on fan terraces, have answered that it is essential for them to reproduce the voices of all those involved. Readers should be aware of that debate, because it defines the magazine's character: it reports from inside fan culture, with the access and sympathy that brings, and it accepts the questions about distance that such a position invites.

History Written by the Magazine Itself

Some of Ballesterer's most consequential work has concerned football under National Socialism. In 2003, on the initiative of its author David Forster, a memorial plaque for the victims of National Socialism was unveiled at Vienna's Ernst-Happel-Stadion, then the Praterstadion. The basis was research for an article in its series Fußball unterm Hakenkreuz, Football Under the Swastika, which dealt with the internment of concentration camp prisoners in the stadium during the Nazi period. In 2004 the magazine, together with the Jewish cultural magazine Nu, triggered a debate about the Aryanisation of a coffee house by the Austrian football hero Matthias Sindelar. Books on football under National Socialism in Austria, including Grün-Weiß unterm Hakenkreuz, also grew out of initiatives connected with the magazine.

Recognition came early from the fan-magazine world the title came from. In 2004 the German Alliance of Active Football Fans awarded Ballesterer the German Fanzine Cup, the first time it had gone to a non-German medium. In January 2005 more than 50 fanzine editorial teams from the German-speaking area voted it the best general fan newspaper, and in May 2005 the German football magazine 11 Freunde named it its magazine of the month. It is routinely placed in the same European family of culturally minded football magazines as 11 Freunde and Der tödliche Pass in Germany, Zwölf in Switzerland, When Saturday Comes in England, So Foot in France and Hard gras in the Netherlands.

Audience and Readership

The audience is best described from the magazine's own structure rather than from audited demographic data, which is not published in the sources consulted for this profile. Its readers are supporters who want more than match reports: fans of Austrian and international football who are interested in fan scenes, in the history of their clubs and stadiums, in the politics and economics of the game, and in long, well-written texts. The sale of the magazine through German railway-station bookshops and selected Swiss outlets, as well as across Austria, shows that its readership extends across the German-speaking football public and is not confined to Vienna or to supporters of one Austrian club.

Its contributor model also blurs the line between audience and authors in a way few commercial titles attempt. A pool that once numbered around 150 occasional authors, and more than 300 contributors in its first decade, means that many of its writers have come from its readership. That is one reason its tone combines knowledge of terrace culture with academic and journalistic approaches: political scientists, historians, doctors, cabaret artists and ordinary groundhoppers have all appeared in its pages alongside trained journalists.

Journalistic Recognition and Public Role

Over the two decades since its founding, Ballesterer authors have repeatedly been nominated for and have won journalism prizes. At the Sports Media Austria journalists' prizes, Stefan Kraft and Reinhard Krennhuber won in the print category in 2012, as did Nicole Selmer in 2014, when Mathias Slezak was also honoured in the newcomer category for an article for which he had joined the pre-season preparations of Floridsdorfer AC. Clemens Zavarsky won in 2018 and Moritz Ablinger in 2020, again in the print category. Mareike Boysen received a Caritas recognition prize in 2017 for a story about cage footballers, and in 2019 Selmer, Jakob Rosenberg and Benjamin Schacherl received the Professor Claus Gatterer Prize for a reportage about footballers who had migrated to Vienna.

The magazine's standing was demonstrated during reporting for its 36th issue, on the crisis of Italian football. Its editors travelled with Napoli ultras to an away match at AS Roma, during which damage was done in trains and stations, and they were interviewed about the experience both by Der Standard and by the Italian state broadcaster RAI. The episode was widely cited as an example of a small editorial team, on a title then described as having a 20,000 circulation, obtaining access that much larger newsrooms had not. Ballesterer contributors have also appeared as football experts on Austrian television, including on ORF and ATV.

Digital Presence, Events and Partnerships

Ballesterer's digital home is its website at ballesterer.at, which carries current articles and a recent online archive of the magazine's work, and through which subscriptions and individual issues are sold. The magazine has also produced a podcast under the Ballesterer name, with episodes discussing individual issues, their thematic focuses and wider questions such as the 50+1 rule, investors and fan democracy in German and Austrian football. The digital operation is best understood as an extension of the print magazine rather than a separate news service: it does not chase minute-by-minute match coverage, which the editors have themselves criticised as converging on identical agency copy across large media websites.

Beyond publishing, the magazine is an organiser and partner in Austrian football culture. With the Vienna public libraries, which host Austria's first football library, and the anti-racism initiative Fairplay, it runs Club 2x11, a discussion series that brings players, officials and specialists together several times a year for panel discussions on football topics. At major tournaments it has co-hosted public screenings in Vienna, and for Euro 2008 it cooperated with the Austrian radio station FM4 on a compilation of Swiss and Austrian music. Its listed media and cooperation partners have included derStandard.at, Laola1.at, the German Academy for Football Culture, Fairplay and Kicken ohne Grenzen, the touring exhibition Fantastic Females and the Ute Bock Cup football tournament.

Significance and Limits of the Record

Ballesterer's significance lies in having proved, over more than two and a half decades, that a self-published, fan-rooted magazine can professionalise without surrendering its subject to either club marketing or conventional results journalism. It created a durable Austrian home for a form of football writing that treats supporters as citizens, history as news, and discrimination and commercialisation as football stories in their own right. Its early historical research changed physical public memory, in the form of a memorial plaque at Austria's national stadium, which is a claim very few magazines of any size can make.

The limits of the public record should be stated plainly. The most complete figures available for this profile, notably the 20,000-copy circulation, come from the magazine's own 2020 media data rather than from a current independent circulation audit, and no more recent audited circulation, revenue or detailed readership survey was found in the sources consulted. Its early history is documented largely through its own retrospectives and through German-language reference works that draw on them. Those caveats do not undermine the central, well-corroborated facts: founded in Vienna in the spring of 2000 from a university seminar project, modelled on When Saturday Comes, club-independent, self-published, appearing ten times a year, and still edited in Vienna as Austria's best-known magazine of football and fan culture.