Germany's football clubs are beginning to cut back as they face the prospect of losing millions of marks as a result of the Kirch Group meltdown.

The Bundesliga's members have built their budgets around the money Kirch was meant to be paying them for the rights to screen games on TV.

But with KirchMedia - the holder of the rights - now in administration, largely because of the billions paid for the World Cup, Formula One and the Bundesliga, many clubs are now facing a severely straitened existence.

First division eastern German team Hansa Rostock, for example, has called off negotiations with new players.

"At the moment we are not signing any new contracts," its board chairman Horst Klinkmann told Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel.

Money from the TV rights make up 14m euros of Hansa Rostock's 30m euro budget.

Dim prospect of payment

KirchMedia was meant to have paid 100m euros ($88m; �61.3m) in May, with another 100m in August of a total 286.3m for the full season.

Neither payment now looks likely, despite bullish comments from Edmund Stoiber, premier of Bavaria where Kirch is based and a personal friend of the group's founder, Leo Kirch.

The pessimistic view is that some smaller members of the 36-club league could go bust as a result.

The German government has floated the idea of a 200m euro rescue fund.

The two public broadcasters, ARD and ZDF, are under pressure to take over the rights.

But neither is willing to pay anywhere near as much as Kirch had.

End of an era

The situation is reminiscent of the one facing the English Football League, which is owed �178m by ITV Digital.

Now in administration, ITV Digital says it cannot pay, and the League's clubs say several face going to the wall.

As in Germany, the huge hikes in wage bills and transfer fees of recent years mean they are massively dependent on TV money to stay afloat.