Djamal Ziane is a three-time league champion, but the Lokomotive Leipzig captain has learned that not every title brings the reward it should. This summer, for the second year in a row and the third time in seven seasons, he lifted the trophy after leading Lok to the Regional League Northeast title in the fourth tier of German football. As in 2025 and 2020, however, the championship did not bring promotion.
While the other regional champions in Germany’s fourth division moved up to the nationwide 3. Liga, Lok were sent into a play-off against the Regional League Bavaria representative, Würzburger Kickers. Ziane scored, but an injury-ravaged Leipzig lost 3-1 on aggregate. Around 2,000 travelling supporters displayed a banner reading “Euer System ist krank” — “your system is sick.”
“It’s the worst thing — injury aside — that you can experience as a footballer,” Ziane said. “Catastrophe doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t make any sense. If they really wanted to change it, they could do tomorrow.”
The reason lies in a bottleneck in the German pyramid. Beneath the Bundesliga, 2. Bundesliga and 3. Liga, the fourth tier is split into five regional divisions — North, West, Southwest, Northeast and Bavaria — each of which produces a champion. But only four teams are relegated from the 3. Liga each season, leaving four promotion places for five champions. The current compromise gives automatic promotion to the West and Southwest champions, rotates a third automatic spot among the other three leagues in a three-year cycle, and allocates the final place through a play-off between the winners of the remaining two leagues.
One champion always misses out and, increasingly, it is the champion of the Regional League Northeast, covering the territory of the former East Germany. Alongside Lok Leipzig’s three failures, Dynamo Berlin fell short in 2022 and Energie Cottbus in 2023. This season there is only one eastern German club in the 3. Liga: Hansa Rostock.
The difficulties facing eastern clubs are partly tied to continuing socio-economic disparities between east and west, which were also reflected in the success of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in recent state elections. In 2026, none of the 40 leading companies on Germany’s DAX stock exchange is based in the former east outside Berlin, while salaries remain lower, unemployment higher, and the population older and shrinking as young people move west. The automatic spots for West and Southwest are justified by the higher number of men’s teams registered in those jurisdictions — because more people live there.
Ziane is tired of that argument. “In that case, you might as well give us the automatic promotion spot because we attract bigger crowds,” he said. The average attendance in the Regional League Northeast last season was 3,125, around twice as high as in the other leagues. Lok Leipzig had the fourth highest average at 6,352, and more than 11,000 attended the local derby against city rivals Chemie Leipzig.
Lok chief executive Toni Wachsmuth, 39, says he does not have access to sponsors with the same financial firepower as counterparts further west. “The [western] leagues do have better economic foundations but everyone agrees that the current system is nonsense,” he said. “Everyone needs to compromise but some officials are clearly putting their own interests and positions above the general good of German football.”
The latest push for change came from the east, with clubs launching a campaign in March 2025 under the slogan “Meister müssen aufsteigen!” — champions must go up. Their proposal is to reduce five leagues to four, with geographical borders redrawn each season with the help of artificial intelligence, taking into account factors such as distance of travel to away games and attractive derbies. They call it the compass model, because it can go in all directions. In return, the Regional League Northeast is prepared to give up its emotional attachment to the territory of the former East Germany.
“I want to get away from this east-west debate,” said Tommy Haeder, the 35-year-old chief executive of Chemnitzer FC and figurehead of the reform campaign. “We’ve had a change of generation. Many older officials have retired and been replaced by younger people who don’t have this nostalgia for the GDR.” Haeder argues a fairer promotion system would benefit German football as a whole, with eastern clubs better equipped to keep nurturing youth talent. “It’s not in the interest of talent development when young footballers from Chemnitz are torn away from their homes and families at the age of 10 to join academies in Hamburg, Dortmund or Stuttgart,” he said. “The compass model is a model in which every region sacrifices a little bit to solve a much bigger problem. We’re organised, we have a plan, we’ve made suggestions. Now it’s up to the federations to act.”
More than 80 clubs across Germany, from east to west and up and down the pyramid, have backed the campaign. Union Berlin, who were playing in the fourth tier as recently as the 2000s, became the first Bundesliga club to officially support the initiative. Club president Dirk Zingler said the current set-up contradicts “our understanding of sporting competition.” Borussia Dortmund president and Bundesliga chairman Hans-Joachim Watzke added: “Champions must go up and we think the compass model with four regional leagues is the best option.” Bournemouth head coach Marco Rose, drawing on his past as both a player and coach at Lok Leipzig, said: “I know what it’s like for clubs trying to work within their means, or lack of means, at that level. Everything is on a knife edge. You have to give the clubs and their fans the belief that their efforts and sacrifices will be rewarded with promotion.”
Momentum was growing before a key vote at the end of June, when clubs were finally set to decide on the compass model after months of discussions. The ballot descended into farce when the regional federations conducting the vote announced two last-minute changes: the four new leagues would consist of only 18 teams rather than 20, meaning 10 more teams would miss out, and a majority would be required in each of the five regions for the model to pass.
An overall majority of 50.9% still voted in favour of the compass model, including 60.9% in the West, 61.5% in the North and 76.3% in the Northeast. But the Southwest voted for an alternative option in which the northeastern league would be dissolved and its clubs reallocated, while the Southwest and West would remain the same. Robert Lempka, chief executive of Regional League Southwest side FSV Frankfurt, told local public broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk that moving “from a functioning system to a complex, insecure and economically riskier model without an obvious benefit doesn’t make any sense to me,” adding: “I find it unsettling that an untransparent algorithm should decide a club’s future.” The Bavarians voted vaguely for “further talks,” with Bavarian Football Federation president Christoph Kern telling Munich’s Abendzeitung in August: “We’ve gathered our clubs together on several occasions and none of the suggested models have majority support. I’m not prepared to simply give up the Regional League Bavaria like that.” For Haeder, the vote was “an absolute catastrophe — completely amateurish.”
Protests have erupted across German football this season. In the Regional League Northeast, almost every game has begun with a delay as players refused to play for the first minute. On the opening day, Lok Leipzig supporters threw hundreds of plastic trophies on to the pitch, symbolising the worthlessness of their club’s back-to-back titles. In Bavaria, Bayern Munich’s ultras attended a reserve team game in the regional league and produced an intricate choreography criticising the BFV. A banner beneath a display depicting BFV officials using a magnet to pull a compass needle towards them read: “You’ve taken us for fools long enough.” The ultras then set off red pyrotechnics that turned the compass needle back in the direction of the fans. Before the international break, fans of clubs across the Bundesliga used their platform to call for reform with co-ordinated banners reading: “Clubs and fans betrayed! Champions must go up! Compass model now!”
The compass may finally be pointing towards a resolution after the German Football Federation (DFB) announced an extraordinary general meeting on 18 December. “[The issue] must be resolved,” said DFB president Bernd Neuendorf. “The compass model received the most votes and offers the best chance for a concentration of elite performance and therefore better development of talent.” Any changes would only be implemented in the 2028-29 season — too late for Ziane who, now 34, has embarked on his 13th season with Lok Leipzig. Back-to-back champions, still in the fourth division.
“You can never completely get over it because, at our level, the 3. Liga is probably the pinnacle. Promotion with my hometown club would have been the most wonderful thing in the world for me,” Ziane said. “It’s a shame that we have to force ourselves to remember what we’ve achieved. It’s so hard to win this league and we did it twice in a row! You can’t take that for granted.”