I seem to remember hearing last year that they're upto their eyeballs in debt. Some expensive and awful signings haven't helped, Van Der Vaart springs to mind.
They denied that there is huge debt and I think their problem is that they've had the wrong people making the decisions in recent years and they're signing the wrong players. I'm not that clued up on what's going on in detail, but I just have the feeling that every now and again they're changing the people in the boardroom or even their manager, but they always replace them with guys who are just as bad or even worse. At the moment, Hamburger Morgenpost and other news-outlets are going with a story about Emir Spahic (a player they've just signed in the summer after Leverkusen cancelled his contract because he was fighting with stewards) behaving like a complete twat in the dressing room. The initial story is that he told Lewis Holtby to shut up or he'll punch him in the face after Holtby fired them up during half-time against Bayern. There are also stories that he was involved in a dispute during pre-season and that he told Holtby and two other players "Get out of my way, you pussys". For a club that's successful none of those stories would be a big deal in my view. For Hamburg it's a disaster as they've just gotten rid of Behrami who apparantly was seen as a disrupting influence in the dressing room. At least, according to one guy from Hamburg I know.
Add to that, that only a week or so ago, there was a story that their sporting director had a backpack full of internal documents that went missing. Apparantly it was stolen and some lady found it lying around in a park. The stuff that was in there included documents with player-contract-details.
