When Borussia Dortmund play their first away game of the season against newly promoted RB Leipzig on Saturday, thousands of their most diehard fans will be following the team’s progress not in the stadium but over the radio.

Supporters of Dortmund, whose home ground averages one of the highest attendances in world football, have announced they will refrain from travelling to Leipzig, 210 miles (340km) to the east, in protest at their opponents’ commercial structure.

Instead they will be watching Dortmund’s youth team play at their old ground, Rote Erde, and following the senior squad’s Bundesliga match via a live radio broadcast. “Of course Dortmund makes money, but we do it in order to play football,” said Jan-Henrik Gruszecki, one of the protest’s organisers. “But Leipzig plays football in order to sell a product and a lifestyle. That’s the difference.”

The grassroots rebellion is the latest in an ever-growing list of protests against a club that has fast become the most hated in German football.

Until 2009, RB Leipzig was a fifth-division club called SSV Markranstädt that few had heard of even in its native Saxony. Then the Austrian energy drink manufacturer Red Bull bought the club’s licence, changed its name, crest and kit, and promised a transfer budget of a rumoured €100m (£85m).

Since the rulebooks of German football do not allow clubs to be named after their sponsors, the new club was christened Rasenballsport Leipzig, meaning “lawn ball sports” – a name that the club’s marketing team studiously avoids in its promotional material in favour of “The Red Bulls” or simply “RB”.

But what offends Leipzig’s critics is less the club’s marketing strategy than the possibility that it could undermine the structures that in recent years have given German club football a good name.

Unlike in other leagues in Europe, the statutes of the German Football Association deter big investors from taking over its clubs. According to the so-called “50+1” rule, clubs must hold a majority of their own voting rights. Only investors who have been involved with a club for more than 20 years can apply for an exception to the 50+1 rule.

In Borussia Dortmund’s case, this means that 139,000 paying members have a veto over issues such as ticket prices.

RB Leipzig sign up to the letter of the 50+1 rule but – so their critics allege – corrupt its spirit: while membership at Dortmund costs adults €62 per annum, being a “gold” member at Leipzig will set you back €1,000 a year – and that still only makes you a “supporting” or non-voting member.

Even after being forced by the German FA to open up their membership structure in order to get a licence for the first division, RB Leipzig only have 17 members proper – the majority of whom are either employees or associates of Red Bull.

As a result, RB Leipzig’s seven-year rise into German football’s top flight has been dogged by boycotts and protest stunts by opposing fans. At Union Berlin in 2014, the team was met with spectators clad in black plastic ponchos and a 15-minute silence after kick-off.

Supporters of Dynamo Dresden threw a severed bull’s head onto the side of the pitch during a game. Photograph: Imago/Barcroft Images

In the first round of the German cup this season, supporters of Dynamo Dresden threw a severed bull’s head on to the side of the pitch. And in the opening match of the new season, fans of Hoffenheim – previously reviled as the Bundesliga’s other “plastic” club – waved sarcastic placards that read: “We want our throne back: Germany’s most hated club.”

In the buildup to Saturday’s fixture, Dortmund have refused Leipzig the licence to use their logo and name on a joint “friendship scarf”.

RB Leipzig’s supporters accuse their critics of hypocrisy, pointing out that other clubs with similar corporate support structures, such as Wolfsburg, Leverkusen or Ingolstadt, have been able to avoid the same level of scrutiny.

“It seems some people are more content with moaning about us than coming up with a workable way in which the 50+1 rule could be reformed”, said Matthias Kiessling, who writes a blog about the club.

Leipzig’s defenders point to the club’s progressive football philosophy. Under their innovative director of sports, Ralf Rangnick, RB have played attractive football and invested mainly in young players no older than 24, recently managing to lure the promising Scottish 19-year-old Oliver Burke to join from Nottingham Forest.

For young fans in the Leipzig area, watching big clubs like Dortmund and Bayern complain nervously about the Saxon upstart is a novel and exciting experience: the last time a team from the former GDR played in the Bundesliga – Energie Cottbus in 2009 – RB Leipzig had not yet been founded.

The question remains whether Red Bull’s marketing strategy can provide a long-term future for the former East Germany’s football landscape, which was ravaged by systemic lack of funds and the opportunistic scouts of West German clubs after reunification in 1990.

Sceptics point to Red Bull’s other football franchise, Salzburg, once the kingpin of the Austrian firm’s football empire, which has recently had to come to terms with its new status as a feeder club for its younger sibling after failing to qualify for the Champions League nine times in a row.

Over the summer, Rangnick transferred three of Salzburg’s best players to Leipzig. After years of being Austria’s most hated club, fans complained in an open letter to the almighty sponsor that they were now a “laughing stock”.