A new figure is pulling the strings at Borussia Dortmund, and he has made clear from the outset that he intends to use the authority now at his disposal. Since late November, Carsten Cramer — the 57-year-old who built BVB's commercial empire over more than a decade — has held the chief executive role, and he has moved with a speed and candour that has caught many observers off guard. The contrast with what preceded him is sharp, deliberate, and already generating results.
From Commercial Architect to Chief Executive
Cramer's rise to the top of Borussia Dortmund is the product of an unconventional career that began far from the boardrooms of professional football. He sold table-tennis equipment in a sports retail outlet, worked as a stadium announcer for Preußen Münster and Hamburger SV, and studied law — before his instincts for marketing and sales drew him permanently into the business of professional football. He joined BVB in 2010 and spent the following years building a commercial infrastructure that transformed the club's financial profile. Annual turnover now comfortably exceeds half a billion euros, with his divisions — marketing, sales, digitalisation and internationalisation — contributing a substantial share.
His appointment to the chief executive role was therefore less an arrival than an elevation. Yet it came with an enlarged mandate: responsibility for communications and strategy now sits alongside his existing portfolio. And Cramer has not treated the expanded brief as symbolic. Within weeks of taking the position, long-serving Director of Communications Sascha Fligge was shown the door. The message was unambiguous: continuity for its own sake was no longer the operating principle.
The Appointment That Defined His Intentions
Nothing illustrated Cramer's willingness to act unconventionally more clearly than the appointment of Ole Book as sporting director. Book arrived from second-tier club SV Elversberg — a choice that surprised much of the football world, given the scale of responsibility he was being handed. His introductory appearance lasted fewer than 40 minutes, but the event was notable less for what Book said than for what Cramer articulated around him.
"Over the past few weeks and months, we have shown that we are willing to muster a great deal of courage and are keen to make Borussia Dortmund even better," Cramer stated. He followed this by expressing little appetite for retrospection: "I am not a big fan of always looking to the past, because looking back too much eventually leads to a stiff neck." The remark carried a quiet but discernible edge — a signal that the club's tendency to invoke past glories rather than construct a credible forward-looking narrative would no longer define the institution's posture.
Cramer described the move away from Sebastian Kehl not as a reset but as "a major update" — a framing that is telling. Resets imply starting from scratch. Updates preserve what functions and discard what does not. The distinction suggests Cramer has a clear-eyed assessment of what BVB actually needs: not demolition, but disciplined reinvention.
A Club That Needed a Reckoning
The backdrop to Cramer's ascent has not been comfortable. An abuse scandal involving a former high-ranking club official, a public and acrimonious dispute between incumbent president Dr Reinhold Lunow and former chief executive Hans-Joachim Watzke, and a protracted run of underwhelming on-pitch performances had left the club's institutional credibility badly bruised. Cramer did not minimise any of this. He stated plainly that BVB had not emerged from the abuse affair with credit — a form of directness that had been conspicuously absent from the club's public communications for some time.
A 2024 open letter from the influential Südtribüne Dortmund fan group captured the frustration precisely: the club was described as "strategy-less" and accused of "perpetually fixing the same old mistakes with the same old methods." That letter was published despite what had been, on paper, a positive end to the previous season. The grievance was not simply about results — it was about institutional drift, a sense that the club had lost a coherent identity and was operating on autopilot.
Cramer is clearly aware of this diagnosis and has accepted it. His stated ambition — to rekindle the energy and clarity of purpose that characterised the Jürgen Klopp era, while building something distinctly his own — is neither modest nor vague. "Our ambition is not to be number two permanently," he told Westfälische Nachrichten. "To achieve that, we must have this hunger, this obsession with winning. Throughout the entire club. In every department."
Infrastructure, Women's Football, and the Broader Vision
Cramer's agenda extends well beyond personnel decisions. The first-team training centre is being expanded. BVB's women's section — a project Cramer has championed — will soon occupy a purpose-built facility with its own pitches, situated adjacent to the men's facility. He appointed the highly decorated Ralf Kellermann as sporting director for the women's setup and recruited striker Alexandra Popp, signalling that ambition in women's football is substantive rather than cosmetic.
Taken together, these moves suggest a chief executive who understands that institutional credibility is built through consistent action across multiple fronts simultaneously — not through a single dramatic gesture. His self-description as a "catalyst" is apt. A catalyst does not generate energy from nothing; it lowers the barriers that prevent change from occurring. Cramer appears to have concluded that BVB's primary problem was not a lack of resources or talent, but a structural resistance to bold decision-making that had calcified over time.
He acknowledged as much at Book's presentation with unusual candour: "We must embrace change and take unconventional measures, which may involve bringing in new faces. That starts with me." It was a statement of personal accountability rarely heard from executives at this level of professional football administration — and precisely the kind of remark that distinguishes a leader willing to be judged from one who manages expectations downward.
How durable this energy proves will depend, ultimately, on whether the structural changes Cramer is driving translate into sustained institutional quality. But the early trajectory is coherent, the pace has been maintained, and the direction of travel is clearer than it has been at BVB in some years. That, for now, is considerably more than the club's most vocal critics had reason to expect.