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UNION BERLIN, RB LEIPZIG AND DORTMUND ARE WORLDS APART BUT FAN OWNERSHIP IS BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN OLD AND NEW
THE walk by the River Wahle leads deeper into the forest. Suddenly a form emerges on the other bank. There is a glimpse of metal, a view of mesh and turnstile and the unmistakable signs of a football ground.
A walk across a bridge reveals the Stadion An der Alten Försterei in all its considerable glory. This is a stadium of significance and charm, even idiosyncrasy.
As my old maw might say, no two bits of it are hinging the right way.
This is an edifice that has been built by the hands of Union Berlin fans. It has no sleek lines, no space-age towers or sophisticated light shows.
It stands in silence on a nonmatchday Friday. But it speaks to something important in German football. It is a repository of myth and legend.
It reveals its past with the aid of Ross Dunbar, who works for Union’s communications department. The exiled Scot takes a key and ushers my son and myself into the Försterei. An aspect of German football has been accessed.
The next day we will travel to Leipzig, to another stadium, to another facet of the Bundesliga, but on a bright Friday we can bask in the story of Union, an insistent repudiation of the accepted realities of a major league.
There are myths about German football. They state that it is extraordinarily cheap, that fan power/ownership keeps it morally upright and that any club with ambition and good fortune can access the riches of the Bundesliga.
Like all myths, there is truth in some of this but there is a chill reality that tempers any incontinent romanticism. Except at the Försterei.
Behind a terrace sits a large pole festooned with names with a huge builder’s hat on top. ‘That is in tribute to the fans who built the stadium,’ says Dunbar, alluding to the modernisation of 2008 whereby 2,000 fans brought the ground into the 21st century.
Historic touches remain, however. The scoreboard is operated manually with cards being slotted into holes.
There is a building sitting incongruously in one corner, where security men keep an eye on proceedings. There is the undeniable feeling of the past reaching uncertainly for the present.
Union is a club that lived behind the wall. The walk from Köpenick station to the ground is beautiful, but it also hints at another side to cosmopolitan Berlin.
‘We don’t consider ourselves part of the city,’ says a man sipping a beer in the mall that leads on to the riverside path.
‘We were behind the wall here,’ he adds. ‘This was a different world.’
It still can be. Dunbar points out that changes at the club have to be taken slowly sometimes to bring the fanbase along with any initiative. Union is a 50-plus-one club. Crudely, this means the fans have a majority in terms of voting rights.
Many Bundesliga supporters feel this worthy ruling is being lost. Bayer Leverkusen, Wolfsburg, Hoffenheim and RB Leipzig, for example, are seen as largely outside the model by many supporters.
They, in varying degrees, attract the ire of the traditional Bundesliga fan. Union is undoubtedly and irrefutably a 50-plus-one club. Dunbar points out that, for example, a possible venture into e-sports was abandoned because the supporters did not want it.
There are 11,000 members who have season tickets for the 23,000 capacity stadium. Old members who have watched Union clamber slowly but, ultimately dramatically, into the Bundesliga. There are the younger members who have enjoyed that entrance into the elite, achieved in the 2018-2019 season.
Dunbar, who has worked for the club for seven years, has thus been part of a benign revolution. He says, though: ‘Much of the substance of this club remains the same. Yes, we are trying to build a new stand, but that has been held up by the effect of the Covid crisis, but this is largely a club that holds on to its values. The fanbase is deeply loyal. They are passionate, but I get the feeling that success on the park is welcome but is not everything.’
This belief is wonderfully illustrated by Weihnachssingen. On Saturday, December 20, 2003, a post on the fans forum suggested that a little carol singing inside the ground might help fortunes on the park.
On December 23, a small group of fans climbed over the fences to have a concert on the terraces. It has continued ever since on that day in a more organised fashion. More than 20,000 fans attend the event now.
The terrace where they stand is dotted with red marks with a number above them. ‘This tallies to their season ticket book,’ says Dunbar of a stadium that has blessedly never graduated from old school. The fans stand by choice, the club stands for values, some largely unspoken.
DRESDEN hauptbahnhof carries echoes of Grand Central Station, both are architectural beauties enhanced by shimmering light. The signs, the shops and the
rattling trams outside announce to the traveller that one is in a German city. The skirl of the pipes is, then, incongruous. On matchday Saturday when RB Leipzig are facing Borussia Dortmund, it is oddly comforting for two exiled Caledonians in MacDonald father and son to be greeted with a rendering of Scotland the Brave by a lone piper on the forecourt.
Michat, who gently declines to give his second name, perhaps on the grounds that the busking culture has an unreliable adherence to the tax-paying culture, informs me that he is not German but a Pole who is a member of a pipe band in Breslau and travels to Leipzig on weekends to complement his salary as a worker in ceramics.
But why the pipes and why the Scottish songs? ‘I love the pipes and like the songs,’ he says with admirable simplicity.
Two of his countrymen are spotted outside a grand hotel off the market square. This is where Dortmund have spent their night and the club bus gives away their whereabouts.
Igar Tavaykawski and his father, Kuba, travel extensively to German matches. Dressed discreetly in the black and yellow of BvB, they are part of the growing international army that supports the Bundesliga.
‘Tickets are more expensive than people believe,’ says Igar, ‘Season tickets are cheap, but the normal ticket for a game is about 40 euros. I am happy with that. It is good football.’
The ranks of BvB are depleted in Leipzig. ‘They are a bit pious,’ says Torben, who has travelled from Dortmund for the match. He is referring to the fans’ groups who boycott such as Leipzig because the club is deemed as merely a vehicle for Red Bull.
Yet, inside the Red Bull Arena later, the atmosphere is genuinely vibrant, owing no more to corporate culture than many stadiums around the Bundesliga.
The fans chant Rasen-Ballsport Leipzig, perhaps to diminish the widespread belief that RB stands for Red Bull.
The club was only founded in 2009 when the company purchased the playing rights of fifth-tier side SSV Markranstädt with the intent of advancing the new club to the top-flight Bundesliga within eight years. It reached the top league in 2016. It now plays in the Champions League.
This may have caused resentment among some, particularly in rivals’ ultra culture. But on Saturday there is no conflict. Dortmund fans, highly visible because of their yellow colours, sit among the RB support. The match, just short of a sell-out, is played amid a constant din. There may be accusations of commercialism, but there is passion, too. To the outsider, weaned on a history of football clubs being businesses, there is nothing that jars.
This is undoubtedly a proper football match between two Champions League sides and is played in a stadium that is fit for purpose and with fans whose singing voice is lubricated by intakes of alcohol that would have caused Ollie Reed to nod in reluctant respect.
‘I think the jibes towards RB are overblown,’ says a Dortmund fan sitting behind me. ‘I understand if a lot of fans don’t want to travel, but I want to support my team and be here with my son.’
This is the bond that links Union, RB and BvB. The fan base is disparate in terms of the past and certainly in respect of the stadiums their clubs inhabit. But there are realities in football that shrug off any perceived differences.
RB play wonderfully well. They prevail 2-1 in match full of incident. The RB wall at one end of the stadium erupts in joy. I glance behind me to see the BvB supporter comforting his son, who must be about seven and is crying.
This is football, stripped of myth and legend.