Kawasaki Frontale have successfully defended their J-League title with one match left of the season, their second successive domestic success under head coach Toru Oniki. In order for the club to continue developing on both a sporting and structural level, Frontale regularly send delegations to European football clubs to gain new insights and examine partnership opportunities. Last week, a six-man team from the club – based in Kawasaki, a city of 1.5 million inhabitants within the Greater Tokyo Area – visited VfB Stuttgart. The main topics of the discussions were sponsoring and marketing.
Cooperation and connection
VfB’s head of marketing and sales, Jochen Röttgermann, welcomed the guests from the Land of the Rising Sun. Heiko Stroh, head of internationalisation, took the group on a tour through the Mercedes-Benz-Arena and the club grounds, as well as organising meetings with representatives from individual departments. VfB’s U15/U14 goalkeeping coach Yusaburo Matsuoka also met his compatriots. The visit was rounded off with a tour of the 125th birthday exhibition at the Mercedes-Benz-Museum, led by VfB historian Dr. Florian Gauß. “The exchange with the representatives from Frontale was most interesting,” said Röttgermann. “We’ve agreed that we’ll stay in contact and also that VfB representatives will go to Kawasaki in 2019. Clearly it’s far too early at this stage to talk concretely about how we can work together, but there are definitely opportunities for cooperation and connecting factors within individual business areas, which we’ll now look into.”