Since assuming the chief executive role at Borussia Dortmund in late November, Carsten Cramer has moved with a speed and candour that stands in sharp contrast to the years of institutional drift that preceded him. The 57-year-old, who built his reputation at the club across fifteen years in commercial leadership, now oversees communications and strategy in addition to marketing, sales, digitalisation and internationalisation — and he has wasted little time signalling that the BVB of the next decade will look markedly different from the one that stagnated through the last two. His message is deliberate and direct: not a reset, but a major update.
A Club That Has Needed a New Direction
Borussia Dortmund entered this period carrying considerable institutional baggage. An abuse scandal involving a former high-ranking official, a bitter and public dispute between outgoing figurehead Hans-Joachim Watzke and presidential challenger Dr Reinhold Lunow, and two consecutive seasons of deeply underwhelming results had eroded both the club's internal coherence and its standing with supporters. Last May, the large fan group Südtribüne Dortmund published an open letter describing the club as "strategy-less" and accusing it of "perpetually fixing the same old mistakes with the same old methods." It was a verdict that no one inside the club seriously contested.
Cramer has not sought to minimise this inheritance. He acknowledged plainly that BVB did not emerge from the abuse affair with credit. That willingness to speak without evasion is itself a shift in register. Where his predecessor frequently reached for the rhetoric of past glories, Cramer has explicitly distanced himself from backward-looking narratives, noting that "looking back too much eventually leads to a stiff neck." For a club whose identity had become tangled up in a golden era now more than a decade behind it, that is a meaningful repositioning.
An Unconventional Appointment and What It Signals
The most striking early decision of Cramer's tenure was the appointment of Ole Book as sporting director. Book arrived from SV Elversberg, a second-tier club — a choice that surprised much of the football world given the scale and ambition of the institution he was joining. Cramer has been unapologetic. He described Book as "the missing piece of the puzzle" and framed the appointment as evidence that the club is willing to act with courage rather than default to convention. The selection of an executive without top-flight experience at a club of Dortmund's standing is a calculated risk, and Cramer clearly owns it.
Shortly before Book's arrival, long-serving Director of Communications Sascha Fligge was shown the door — another signal that Cramer intends to refresh the people around him, not merely the language. He has been equally active in the club's women's section, appointing the highly decorated Ralf Kellermann as sporting director and securing the signing of striker Alexandra Popp. A purpose-built facility with dedicated pitches for the women's section, adjacent to the men's training centre, is also under development. These are not cosmetic gestures. They reflect a coherent — if still unproven — vision of what a modern, well-resourced football institution should look like.
The Man Behind the Mandate
Understanding Cramer requires understanding his trajectory. He began his working life selling table-tennis equipment in a sports goods store and spent years as a stadium announcer for Preußen Münster and Hamburger SV. He studied law but his instincts pulled him toward marketing and commercial strategy, and it was in that space — rather than in the legal profession — that he built his career. Since joining Dortmund in 2010, he has presided over a sustained expansion of the club's commercial reach. Annual turnover has grown to comfortably exceed half a billion euros, with a significant share attributable to the divisions Cramer ran.
His approach is characterised by a persuasiveness that is relational rather than transactional. Those who have worked with him describe a man who listens before he speaks and who carries authority without condescension — a combination that has made him effective in building partnerships with major sponsors and, at least in internal contexts, with institutional stakeholders. He has also shown a willingness to absorb criticism without retreating: when several unconventional kit designs drew pointed complaints from supporters, he held his position. That resilience will matter considerably in the months ahead.
What Credibility Now Requires
Cramer has articulated his ambition with unusual bluntness. In an interview with Westfälische Nachrichten, he stated that the club's aspiration is "not to be number two permanently" and that achieving more requires "this hunger, this obsession with winning" to permeate every department of the organisation. He describes himself as a "catalyst" — someone whose role is to set processes in motion and hold the institution accountable to its own stated values. The reference to the Jürgen Klopp era is implicit throughout his public remarks: that period represented a cultural high-water mark that combined success with identity, and it is clearly the benchmark against which Cramer measures what BVB could again become.
Whether the ambition translates into lasting structural change will depend on factors that no amount of confident rhetoric can substitute for — above all, what Book and a reshaped squad actually deliver on the pitch over the coming seasons. The current Bundesliga campaign has been considerably more encouraging than its two predecessors, with the club generating momentum that has brought Champions League qualification within comfortable reach. That context gives Cramer space to operate, but it does not guarantee that the harder reforms — in squad construction philosophy, in communication culture, in institutional governance — will take hold. At Book's introduction, Cramer stated that meaningful change "starts with me." It is a rare kind of accountability for a person in his position to claim publicly. The coming months will begin to show what it is worth.