Infront Germany, a subsidiary of the international sports marketing agency Infront Sports & Media, will continue its cooperation with the traditional German football club

Zug, Switzerland / Munich, Germany, 15 April 2010 – Fortuna Düsseldorf and Infront Germany announced the extension of the marketing agreement for the German football club. The successful partnership dates back to July 2009 and will continue over the next four seasons.

The decision was preceded by a tendering procedure lasting several months, in which other proposals were evaluated. Dr. Dirk Kall, Chairman of the Fortuna Düsseldorf Supervisory Board said, “Our positive experience with Infront over the last eight months or so did not prevent us from intensively evaluating the possibility of cooperating with Infront’s competitors. The selection procedure, which was a unanimous decision, approved by the Board of Directors and the Supervisory Board, resulted in an extension of the partnership between Infront and Fortuna.”

Infront has been active in the German sports market for more than three decades and has comprehensive marketing experience in diverse areas. One of the company’s top references in Germany is the German Football Association (DFB), collaborating as the marketing partner for the German national team and the DFB Cup for many years. The Infront Group also represents the media and/or marketing rights of nine national football associations and numerous clubs in Europe, including AC Milan, FC Schalke 04 and Werder Bremen.

The company has partnerships with FIFA, the French Ligue 1 and the professional Italian league (series A and B). The majority of the partnerships that Infront has formed in the past are based on many years of collaboration, and in some cases, the partnerships have been extended many times.

After the initial collaboration between Infront and Fortuna was announced in July 2009, Infront quickly lined up new companies as advertising customers for Fortuna – such as the Bauhaus company, METRO Group, Wodka Gorbatschow and Wolf Heiztechnik. This resulted in significant additional revenue for the club which was generated at short notice before the beginning of the 2009/2010 season.

The new contract will run for the next four seasons, with all rights remaining with Fortuna. Dr. Kall said, “This part of our agreement was very important to us and like everything else mutually agreed between Infront and Fortuna.”
Günter Netzer, member of the Board of Directors at Infront Sports & Media, expanded on this by saying, “The extension of our successful partnership with Fortuna Düsseldorf over the next four years was our long term goal when we signed the first contract in 2009. This is the result of a collaboration marked by trust and transparency that has proven Fortuna and Infront’s marketing cooperation works extremely well. The short-term achievements also illustrate this, we won’t relax our efforts in that respect. Fortuna has even greater potential as a communication platform for companies. We will now further exploit that potential together.”

The subject of the cooperation is the marketing of the most important commercial rights of Fortuna Düsseldorf, including the main sponsor package, all premium and co-sponsorship, extensive parts of the stadium advertising and selected hospitality rights. Infront will open its own office in the Esprit Arena in the near future.

For further information, please contact:

Jörg Polzer
Associate Director, Communication & PR
Infront Sports & Media AG
Tel. +41-41-723 15 15
Fax +41-41-723 15 16
press@infrontsports.com
www.infrontsports.com

Tom Koster
Press Officer
Fortuna Düsseldorf
Tel. +49 211 2380 – 137
Mobile +49 172 970 88 54
t.koster@fortuna-duesseldorf.de
www.fortuna-duesseldorf.de