Nine Million Sausages

Uli Hoeneß was Bayern Munich’s president—the man who built the club into a European institution over three decades, the face of German football’s establishment, someone who described himself, without obvious irony, as indispensable. In March 2014 a Munich court convicted him of tax evasion on €27.2 million. He got three and a half years.

Somebody built a website—Wie viel schuldet Uli?, roughly "how much does Uli owe us?"—that converted the figure into quantities ordinary people can actually picture: 9,066,666 Allianz Arena hot dogs. 38,968 season tickets in the standing terraces at Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion. 10,793 childcare places. 1,227 nurses’ annual salaries. 123 federal chancellor salaries. The math hits differently than the raw number. €27 million is abstract. Nine million sausages is a physical quantity. You can almost smell nine million sausages.

What I keep coming back to is not the verdict itself but the sequence leading to it: Hoeneß made a voluntary disclosure to tax authorities in 2013, apparently believing this would shield him from prosecution. It didn’t. There’s a specific kind of hubris in someone that powerful assuming the rules flex around them even when they’re nominally trying to comply. He wasn’t entirely wrong about his own resilience, as it turned out—he served less than two years, was paroled early, returned to the Bayern presidency, and watched the club win another title while he was inside.

Nine million sausages. Someone could have bought nine million sausages with that money.