\nA league with a social conscience<\/a>
\nUli Hesse-Lichtenberger<\/p>\nEvery once in a while, I glance with a bit of envy at columns sent in by Phil Ball, Roberto Gotta or Jon Carter and Norman Hubbard. They are often about big clubs, bigger names and biggest money, about glamorous teams you can always watch on television because they do well in the Champions League.<\/p>\n
This being, I quote, \u2018The world\u2019s site for the world game\u2019, I sometimes wonder if many people out there in the world still care about the Bundesliga, whose new season will soon get underway.<\/p>\n
If you don\u2019t care (which is, I admit, kind of improbable, because why would you then read this?), if you\u2019re bypassing the Bundesliga because you\u2019re either prejudiced or simply prefer reading about the Ronaldinhos and Beckhams of this world\u2026 well, maybe you should reconsider.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just that there are more goals in the Bundesliga, as I keep hammering home to you action-addicts out there. And it\u2019s not just that the new season will, at last, see some bona fide stars such as Luca Toni and Franck Rib\u00e9ry. No, it\u2019s primarily that you should support the Bundesliga for – ideological reasons.<\/p>\n
Yes. Ideological reasons. After all, you\u2019re a football fan, aren\u2019t you?<\/p>\n
Two years ago, a Swedish writer was touring Germany for a long article he eventually published in a respected football magazine called \u2018Offside\u2018. The piece was headed, somewhat dramatically and perhaps inspired by watching \u2018Lord of the Rings\u2019 too intensely, \u2018The Last Battle\u2019.<\/p>\n
Said writer literally travelled through the whole of the country, from Hamburg to Munich, and met players, officials and writers as well as supporters, both regular fans and members of pressure groups.<\/p>\n
The gist of his article was that Germany is the last major European football country that still fights the pitfalls of commercialism, the last place where fans make their voices heard and are not treated like mere consumer cattle. Hence the title.<\/p>\n
Was he right? Yes, I guess so. It\u2019s difficult for me to make a proper comparison, as I haven\u2019t followed football for any meaningful period of time abroad, but I know lots of people in foreign countries, and their reports have me concur with what \u2018Offside\u2018 said.<\/p>\n
Last year, for instance, I spoke to branches of the England Supporters Club in Exeter and London. My favourite ploy to get people\u2019s attention was to pull out my Borussia Dortmund season ticket and have them guess the price printed on it. I was well aware that watching football in England is so expensive that hardly anyone would guess the correct figure. (Roughly 150 Euros or slightly less than one hundred pounds.)<\/p>\n
Yet I didn\u2019t expect that some of the fans in attendance would tell me that they supported non-league clubs – and still paid a lot more for a season ticket than I did.<\/p>\n
The average ticket price in England is more than 45 Euros. In Spain, it\u2019s roughly 30 Euros. In Germany, it\u2019s less than 19 Euros. And that\u2019s not even the whole story, as this average price doesn\u2019t explain my 150-Euro season ticket and doesn\u2019t tell the punter on less than princely wages what he will be most interested in: what\u2019s the minimum amount I have to spend to see my team?<\/p>\n
Depending on the club, the cheapest Bundesliga ticket for an adult will set you back between 8 and 10 Euros. Those tickets are, of course, for a part of the grounds many younger and non-German fans only know from hearsay, namely the terraces.<\/p>\n
Now, it\u2019s important to note that there is by and large only one reason most Bundesliga grounds still have standing areas: because the fans wanted it that way.<\/p>\n
In the wake of the Taylor Report, the German FA (DFB) decided to go all-seater together with all the other major European countries, not least because UEFA seemed to force everybody\u2019s hand by decreeing that all European games had to be played in such venues.<\/p>\n
But the German fans were not willing to just grin and bear it. Many pressure groups formed, using the slogan \u2018Seats are for Bums\u2019, and representatives from 23 different clubs demonstrated in front of the DFB headquarters in 1994.<\/p>\n
In the end, they won. Or rather, the DFB won an exemption from UEFA and was allowed to handle domestic matches as it saw fit. This exemption was granted on a trial basis, but you know how it is with these things; it\u2019s been in place ever since.<\/p>\n
Admittedly, fighting the all-seater mania was easier for Germans because we have never been wounded by the emotional scars of a Heysel or a Hillsborough. Then again, the Taylor Report did not declare terraces unsafe in themselves but bemoaned their state.<\/p>\n
(Lines such as \u2018the overall picture of conditions and facilities to be expected by a standing spectator is depressing. It is in stark contrast to the different world, only yards away, in the Board Room and the executive boxes\u2019 abound in the report.)<\/p>\n
The fight for terracing wasn\u2019t the last German supporters would win.<\/p>\n
The fact that they can watch highlights from all Saturday\u2019s matches on free-TV and only about an hour after the final whistle is also neither an accident nor a gift from the powers that be.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s down to protests and even more drastic actions: in 2001, the main free-TV football show was moved to a later time slot to help the pay-TV stations sell more decoders. Whereupon a fans\u2019 pressure group called for a mass boycott.<\/p>\n
Stunningly, the supporters indeed followed the suggestion to simply not tune in at all, neither to the free nor to the pay-TV station. The ratings plummeted so dramatically that the football show was quickly moved back to the earlier starting time.<\/p>\n
In other words, German football fans are a quite active and powerful bunch. And the league and the FA know this and have learned not to ignore them.<\/p>\n
In June, there was even some kind of general meeting, held over two days, between fans from 50 clubs, DFB (the German FA) officials and representatives of the DFL (which runs the two professional leagues). In all, more than four hundred people convened in Leipzig for what the DFB termed the first \u2018Supporters Conference\u2019.<\/p>\n
As is their wont, some of the fans who attended were sceptical rather than euphoric. \u2018At least we could list all of our demands,\u2019 said Martin Endemann from the Alliance of Active Football Fans (BAFF). \u2018Now the DFB will be judged by what it does with this catalogue.\u2019<\/p>\n
He\u2019s certainly got his reasons for being a tad suspicious. But it\u2019s important to remember that there are very few football countries which would even consider such a conference, let alone actually stage it.<\/p>\n
And that there are very few football countries in which a fan could, without the faintest hint of irony, state that he\u2019s got \u2018demands\u2019. At \u2018Offside\u2018, they\u2019d probably now add that there is no other such football country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Really interesting article from ESPN Soccernet: A league with a social conscience Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger Every once in a while, I glance with a bit of envy at columns sent in by Phil Ball, Roberto Gotta or Jon Carter and Norman Hubbard. They are often about big clubs, bigger names and...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football-in-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raithtrust.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raithtrust.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raithtrust.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raithtrust.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raithtrust.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.raithtrust.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raithtrust.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raithtrust.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raithtrust.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}