Carro's outspoken ambition takes Leverkusen to unimaginable heights

The Bayer Leverkusen players and coaching staff had rather important on-pitch matters to preoccupy them last week, but that didn’t stop the Werkself bringing a visible and sparkling presence to New York City.

When you’ve won three different trophies — the Bundesliga‘s Meisterschale, the DFB-Pokal and the DFL-Supercup — in the space of just a few frenetic months, why not display them from the spectacular Manhattan skyline as part of a specially arranged trophy tour in a bid to attract new fans? Club owner Bayer’s consumer health headquarters also happen to be located across the Hudson in New Jersey, so the trip ticked many boxes.

It was a busy week in the Big Apple for the face of the club throughout the trip. Fernando Carro has been Leverkusen’s CEO since 2018, Barcelona born, but Germany based throughout his professional career.

A self-described sports fanatic, Carro was never a professional footballer but a regular attendee of matches in the standing section at the top of Camp Nou, and his mother taught Spanish to, among others, Austrian football great Hans Krankl and Bundesliga coaching legend Udo Lattek during their time with the Blaugrana.

Carro himself attended a German school in the Catalan capital and sat his Abitur (prestigious final exams) there. Little could he have imagined what that immersion in a foreign language would ultimately lead to.

“I wanted to be independent of my parents, and the studies I did, didn’t exist in Spain,” Carro told ESPN last week in New York. “I took engineering and economics, so I went to Germany and stayed for a long time, actually until today. I worked there for a long time with a media company, so Germany is my second home.”

Having spoken to former and current employees of Bayer Leverkusen about Carro, each one of them has variously used the words “likeable,” “pleasant” and “passionate.” There is indeed a twinkle in his eye when he speaks, and he seems happy with a quote from his business past in which he said he loves people and numbers.

“I always say football is a people’s business as we don’t have any factory or production, but we have football players, people working for the club, so it’s really the peoples’ business and the connection there is important,” he said. “At the same time, you must work with your resources.”

When he started in the football industry six years ago, Carro concedes he didn’t just follow the football decision-maker crowd with his public utterances about potential success.

“Bayer 04 was consistently on a good level but we were missing the trophies, so when I came to Leverkusen I realised the desire to win titles was important,” he said. “I said I would prefer to win the DFB-Pokal than to be part of the Champions League.

“On numbers, you should wish to be in the Champions League, where you could earn €25 million to €30m. In the Pokal, you might only get €5m or €6m, but you have that trophy. I said we have the potential to strive for No. 1, not every year, but one year to beat Bayern Munich. I said this in my beginning interview and (then sporting CEO) Rudi Völler said, ‘Don’t say it too often, Fernando.'”

Carro has been reminded of his outspoken ambition by colleagues in the football world.

“They’ve told me, ‘When you started six years ago, we didn’t tell you, but we thought you were crazy,’ because I was saying very openly in meetings with other clubs: I want to become champion.”

Who’s crazy now?

Leverkusen have been richly praised for their astonishing 2023-24 season, the first ever unbeaten domestic campaign by a Bundesliga club and just a point off the best points total recorded in a single campaign. Carro is already eagerly looking forward to the Ballon d’Or Club of the Year award, for which Leverkusen have been nominated, on Oct. 28.

“My impression is, it will be either Real Madrid or us, so if we win this, we will have the recognition,” he said. “If Madrid wins, then we still feel rewarded, because our season was amazing: finalists in the Europa League, 90 points and unbeaten in the league and winning the Pokal. It’s incredible.”

It has been nearly two years since Carro went on the weekly Sport 1 TV panel show “Doppelpass” in front of a live studio audience, and with Leverkusen struggling under then-coach Gerardo Seoane, was asked about the possibility of a coaching change. Carro used the famous words “wir sind gut vorbereitet” (“we are well prepared”).

No one outside Leverkusen at that time knew the preparation would lead to hiring of his compatriot Xabi Alonso, but Carro and highly respected sporting CEO Simon Rolfes had crossed paths with the urbane former midfielder in the months prior.

“When you say you are prepared, it can mean you need a coach in two years or one month, and Simon is always preparing a list of coaches, and we discuss it openly,” Carro said. “Xabi will not stay here forever, and you have to be prepared, and this is something which is professional.”

The rest is now German football history, but whereas most didn’t necessarily believe a Bundesliga title was likely until the early part of 2024 with last-gasp victories at FC Augsburg and RB Leipzig and then the convincing 3-0 win over Bayern, Carro was convinced as early as Matchday 2.

“‘If we play like this every game, no one can beat us,’ I thought,” Carro said of his reaction to the 3-0 triumph at Borussia Monchengladbach in August 2023.

Alonso rightly gets the credit for bringing a certain aura to the Rheinland, but Carro believes the fit also has to do with Rolfes.

“Simon and Xabi see football similarly, wanting to have control of the game. Both were midfielders who played the same position,” Carro said. “What convinced me was Xabi’s analytical skills, how he analysed a situation, what he thought was needed, what he learned from different coaches, so I had the impression he always wanted to learn. His ability to take his experiences as a player and put them into his role as a coach. He’s intelligent, calm, ambitious.”

Thanks to the 2023-24 Unbesiegbaren (Unbeatables), plans are afoot for Leverkusen to run similar trophy tours in Brazil and perhaps Mexico. Carro sees the club already well ahead of most other Bundesliga rivals in terms of international penetration.

“We have the third-best reach among Bundesliga clubs after Bayern and Borussia Dortmund,” he said. “In Germany, instead of 25,000, we now have 60,000 members. Everywhere I go, it has gone to another level because of last season, and I hope we can maintain it.”

Carro has missed only three Bayer 04 games in six years, and so flying back across the Atlantic after a whirlwind 48 hours to go straight to the Kraichgau region and witness Leverkusen’s 4-1 win at TSG Hoffenheim was a priority. Meanwhile, the club arranged a special watch party around the game for Leverkusen fans old and new in a Brooklyn biergarten.

The Bundesliga will not be doing what LaLiga clubs are considering, in potentially taking league games to the U.S. It’s simply incongruous in a culture where football is for local communities first and foremost, and everyone attached to the German game knows this.

But Carro did offer hope to Leverkusen and other Bundesliga fans Stateside that perhaps the DFL-Supercup, the annual curtain raiser, could someday be staged on American soil.

“For me personally, and I can’t speak for anyone else, it would be possible to have the Supercup in the USA or another country,” Carro said. “Many fans don’t like it anyway with it being the same weekend as the first Pokal round, so we could do it differently. We have to have new ways of thinking, and this can be one example.”

Thinking differently has become one of Carro’s hallmarks in German football, and so far, it’s yielded unimaginable success.