Djamal Ziane has won the league three times — but the celebration always comes with a catch.

The Lokomotive Leipzig captain has now lifted the Regional League Northeast trophy in 2020, 2025, and again this summer, leading his club to the title in the fourth tier of German football. Yet on each occasion, the championship has failed to translate into promotion.

A system that does not add up

Germany's football pyramid creates a structural problem beneath the 3. Liga. The fourth tier is divided into five regional leagues — North, West, Southwest, Northeast, and Bavaria — each producing one champion. With only four promotion places available from the 3. Liga each season, one champion is always left behind.

The current arrangement grants automatic promotion to the West and Southwest champions, rotates a third automatic spot among the other three leagues on a three-year cycle, and assigns the fourth place via a play-off between the remaining two champions. This summer, Lokomotive faced Wurzburger Kickers in that play-off and lost 3-1 on aggregate, despite Ziane getting on the scoresheet.

Travelling supporters summed up the mood with a banner that read: "Euer System ist krank" — "your system is sick."

"Catastrophe doesn't cut it. It doesn't make any sense. If they really wanted to change it, they could do tomorrow," Ziane told BBC Sport.

An east-west imbalance

The Regional League Northeast covers the territory of the former East Germany — a region still grappling with socio-economic disadvantages relative to the west. Not one of the 40 companies on Germany's DAX stock exchange is headquartered in the former east outside Berlin. Salaries are lower, unemployment higher, and the population is ageing as young people migrate westward.

Automatic promotion is allocated to the West and Southwest partly because more football clubs — and more people — are registered in those regions. Yet the Northeast consistently outdraws them all: the average attendance in the Regional League Northeast last season was 3,125, roughly twice that of the other leagues. Lokomotive themselves averaged 6,352, with more than 11,000 attending the local derby against Chemie Leipzig.

"Unfortunately, you don't get any points for tradition, crowds and history," said Lok chief executive Toni Wachsmuth, aged 39.

The compass model

Eastern clubs launched a reform campaign in March 2025 under the slogan "Meister müssen aufsteigen!" — champions must go up. Their proposed solution, dubbed the compass model, would reduce the five regional leagues to four, with new geographical borders drawn each season using artificial intelligence, factoring in travel distances and local derbies.

The campaign gathered momentum rapidly, winning the backing of more than 80 clubs. Union Berlin became the first Bundesliga club to endorse the initiative, with club president Dirk Zingler stating that the current set-up "contradicts our understanding of sporting competition." Borussia Dortmund president Hans-Joachim Watzke, who also chairs the Bundesliga, added: "Champions must go up and we think the compass model with four regional leagues is the best option."

Bournemouth head coach Marco Rose, a former player and coach at Lokomotive Leipzig, also lent his voice: "You have to give the clubs and their fans the belief that their efforts and sacrifices will be rewarded with promotion."

A vote that descended into farce

A decisive ballot was scheduled for the end of June, but the vote was derailed at the last minute when regional federations announced two critical changes: league sizes were cut from 20 to 18 teams, and the model would require a majority in each of the five regions to pass — not just an overall majority.

The compass model still secured an overall majority of 50.9%, including 76.3% in the Northeast, 61.5% in the North, and 60.9% in the West. But the Southwest backed an alternative proposal to dissolve the Northeast league and redistribute its clubs, while leaving its own structure unchanged. Bavaria voted vaguely for "further talks."

Tommy Haeder, 35-year-old chief executive of Chemnitzer FC and a leading voice for reform, remains determined. "The compass model is a model in which every region sacrifices a little bit to solve a much bigger problem," he told BBC Sport. "We're organised, we have a plan, we've made suggestions. Now it's up to the federations to act."

For Ziane and thousands of fans in the east, the wait for a fair chance at promotion continues.