Ballspielverein Borussia 09 e. It is best known for its men's professional football team, which plays in the Bundesliga , the top tier of the German football league system. Founded in by eighteen football players from Dortmund, they are nicknamed Die Schwarzgelben The Black and Yellow , for the colours used in the club's crest. They also contest Der Klassiker with Bayern Munich. Dortmund is the second largest sports club by membership in Germany, with about , members, [ 8 ] making Borussia Dortmund the fifth largest sports club by membership in the world.
The club also has a women's handball team. Since , Dortmund have played their home games at the Westfalenstadion ; the stadium is the largest in Germany, and Dortmund has the highest average attendance of any association football club in the world.
The Yellow Wall , a standing terrace in the South Stand, is the largest of its kind in Europe, with Dortmund consistently boasting the highest average attendance in world football. Under the directorship of Michael Zorc in the s, Dortmund cultivated a reputation for spotting and developing young talent, and have remained focused on developing a youth system. The club was founded on 19 December by a group of young men unhappy with the Catholic church-sponsored Trinity Youth , where they played football under the guidance of the local parish priest.
In , they donned the black and yellow stripes for the first time. Over the next decades the club had only modest success playing in local leagues. They came close to bankruptcy in when an attempt to boost the club's fortunes by signing some paid professional footballers failed miserably and left the team deep in debt.
They survived only through the generosity of a local supporter who covered the team's shortfall out of his own pocket. The s saw the rise of the Third Reich , which restructured sports and football organisations throughout the nation to suit the regime's goals. Borussia' s president was replaced when he refused to join the Nazi Party , and a couple of members who surreptitiously used the club's offices to produce anti-Nazi pamphlets were executed in the last days of the war.
