Niebaum and Meier turned Borussia Dortmund the club into BVB AG, Borussia Dortmund the corporation, which did not please every traditionalist among the fans and inside the club. Real opposition, however, only took shape when it was almost too late, because people had been dazzled by the enormous successes of the 1990s and early 2000s: three league titles and, crowning it all, the Champions League. That Niebaum and Meier lost all sense of proportion and reality after forcing successful coach Ottmar Hitzfeld out in 1998 remained hidden for a long time.\n\nIn the new multi-story club headquarters they could operate as they pleased.
Obsessed with turning Borussia into a money-printing machine, the BVB bosses kept pushing further: double-digit million-euro transfers, their own shirt label, a BVB travel agency, a mega-store the size of a shopping mall, their own TV show on DSF - at the start of the 2000s the motto at the newly rich club was simply: the sky is the limit. Many fans no longer recognized their club. But the intoxication came at a price.