RB Leipzig

RB Leipzig (officially in German RasenBallsport Leipzig e. V., literally: Lawn Ball Sports Leipzig, Registered Association, or Leipzig for short, pronounced /ˈʁbiː ˈlaɪptsɪç/) is a sports entity from the city of Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. It plays in the Bundesliga, the top division of German football. The team was founded in 2009 by the Austrian energy drink company Red Bull GmbH, and is the first club of the corporate group to have been created from scratch.

The club started out in the fifth and lowest tier of German football, entering the German football structure by buying the licence of another team in that same division, SSV Markranstädt, which was refounded that same year. Since then, the club has achieved four promotions in only seven seasons, reaching the Bundesliga, where today it is one of the main protagonists. It plays its home matches at the Red Bull Arena, formerly called the Zentralstadion.

Because the rules of the German football league prevent a team from being directly controlled by a single natural or legal person, a clause known as the "50+1 rule", RB Leipzig is legally constituted as a members' club. However, the only members with voting rights are people directly or indirectly linked to Red Bull, which in turn owns several clubs in other countries through the Red Bull GmbH consortium. The club would initially even have been called Red Bull Leipzig, but faced with the regulatory refusal, they looked for a term whose initials would still be "RB": RasenBallsport, or "lawn ball sport" in English.

This has led numerous rival fan groups to reject the team's existence, regarding it as an example of the commercialisation of professional sport. For that reason many fan groups refer to the club disparagingly as Rattenball Leipzig. On the other hand, its defenders consider that it has been a stimulus for improving football in the new states of Germany.