What the team's fans did to save it from bankruptcy, as poetic and heartfelt as it was, was not enough. It was now the turn of another hero from the story's cast of heroes; Dirk Zingler, a businessman active in the construction industry. With the help of the team's fans and his donation campaign, Dirk was able to rescue the team from bankruptcy and has been the club's president ever since.

Perhaps another irony of the story is that even when a businessman intervened to solve the crisis, he was a businessman with a fan background who had stood in the team's stands before and tasted the same bitter cup. Zingler did not stop at what he did in 2004; he also played a role in rebuilding the team's stadium in 2008, dedicating funds and hours of work alongside the team's fans who rolled up their sleeves and flocked in the hundreds.

We have to gather those who share our vision of football behind us, to do so, we have to become much more visible

These words were spoken by Zingler in 2016, specifically on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the club under its new name, "Union Berlin". The team had been performing well for years in the second division league and easily stayed there year after year, but what next? That was the dilemma; the team had entered a comfort zone.

That was the same issue that the team's coach, Jens Keller, criticized between July 2016 and December 2017, expressing his frustration with the club and players' lack of sufficient ambition. Zingler's intended message from his words was clear; this club needs to work harder to catch up with the big boys. Fortunately, Zingler was a man of his word, and from that point on, a comprehensive revolution began, changing everything.

No Money? No Problem

In May 2018, Oliver Ruhnert was appointed as the sporting director of Union, but it was not his first position within the club. He had previously worked as the head of scouting for a year before being promoted to sporting director. Perhaps this is what sets Oliver apart; his keen eye for talent. He had worked as the director of Schalke's academy for six years during one of their most successful periods for producing talent, in addition to his notable profession as a scout, which he did for two periods totaling three years with Schalke.

Oliver was the means by which Union's players were led towards their goal, following the same path as clubs like Brighton and Brentford, another version of "Moneyball," but in the German context. The idea is simple: if you don't have enough money, then you must think differently and have a different vision. With modest means, you can achieve great things.

A simple look at the season in which the team was promoted to the Bundesliga in 2018-2019 shows that the most influential players were those who Oliver brought to the team for very little cost in his first year. For example, Sebastian Andersson, the team's top scorer and most productive player with 17 goal involvements, joined in the summer of 2018 without costing the club a single penny!

Anderson was not the only one, as four other players contributed 8 goal involvements in the promotion season, and they cost the club only a combined $1.75 million. These players were either overlooked names in their Bundesliga teams, or rising talents in lower leagues such as the third tier, and in both cases, they were in dire need of an opportunity and had enough motivation to prove themselves. Therefore, Union Berlin was that chance for them, and they, in turn, were its chance to write a new history.

Perhaps the promotion to the Bundesliga meant a lot to the team's fans who had been waiting for it, but it didn't mean anything to Oliver, the man who continued on the same path since day one. All Oliver did after the promotion was to expand the activity a little, and not limit the search for talents to Germany only, but to other leagues like the Dutch and Belgian leagues.

Perhaps the most prominent example of this is the team's top scorer this season, Sheraldo Becker, the former Ajax academy player, who had difficulty playing with the first team, and took a tour of clubs in the Netherlands before Union signed him from ADO Den Haag on a free transfer in the summer of 2019. Sheraldo has a 0.5 goal contribution rate per game with Union since then, scoring a total of 17 goals and assisting 21 goals in all competitions, which increased his market value to around $13.5 million during that period.

This approach of relying on a diverse group of talents has given the team great flexibility and the ability to overcome setbacks. Sometimes losing an influential player may mean losing the rhythm of the team altogether, but for Oliver, it only meant replacing them with someone else, plain and simple. The players brought in to fill the gap may even add more value than their predecessors.

Let's give you a prominent example of several of those; in the summer of 2020, the team's top scorer, Anderson, left for Cologne in a deal that boosted the club's coffers by $6.5 million. Oliver did not settle for compensating him with one player, but with two. The first was Max Kruse, who joined on a free transfer from the Turkish club Fenerbahce, and the second was Taiwo Awoniyi, who was loaned from Liverpool before being bought for $6.5 million the following summer.

It suffices to say that Kruse was the team's top scorer in the 2020-2021 season in the Bundesliga, contributing to 17 goals in only 18 matches, while Onyewu was the team's top scorer in the following season with 15 goals, before leaving the team last summer for a profit of 14 million dollars. To add players at low prices that provide a huge value is certainly not an easy task, but what is even harder is to compensate for their departure as if nothing happened.

Union Berlin is currently in third place in the table, competing with the giants of the Bundesliga, Borussia and Bayern, for the title, despite having one of the lowest budgets in Germany, with an average spending of 14.25 million dollars per season since the beginning of their promotion season. This small number is not only incomparable to the figures of the leading teams, but only one current Bundesliga club has spent less than them during that period, which is the newly promoted club, Bochum.

You might think that a club being ran by two different people would be prone to destruction. However, that wasn't the case here, but more on that in the next and final part of this series.