WUNDERBAR! No fans but here is live football at last
PEOPLE all over the world will be tuning in to the Bundesliga today, obviously. And the one game to watch, really, is Dortmund-Schalke. For me, that is THE game in German football. Now, not everybody will say that. But anybody who is rooted in German football tradition will tell you that it’s the fixture of the season. It’s the derby, the biggest derby, the mother of all derbies as they say in Germany — Die Mutter aller Derbys. And Germany doesn’t have many on the same level as England and Scotland. You tend not to have cities with two big clubs in them, with the odd exception. But Dortmund and Schalke have a rivalry that would appeal to anybody in Scotland. It’s two teams from industrial cities. You are talking about steel and coal in the old days. They’re only 20-odd miles apart — and they absolutely detest each other! They don’t even call it Dortmund against Schalke. They call it Ludenscheid-Nord against Herne-West.
Ludenscheid is a place just to the south of Dortmund — and Herne is just to the east of Gelsenkirchen, where Schalke are based. So you don’t actually ever say out loud the name of the other team. That’s how much enmity there is in that fixture. It will be different without fans. But I’ve been lucky enough to cover that fixture in Dortmund for the last three years. And it’s so unpredictable, as a derby should be. Two seasons ago, I did that game and it finished 4-4, with Schalke coming back from 4-0 down at half-time. It’s the kind of game that offers all sorts of mad happenings. You’ve also got Frankfurt and Gladbach on Saturday, two traditional teams with a history of success. There’s nothing fake about either team, they’re really embedded in their respective communities. If it were me — and it will be me, because I’ll be watching, too — I’ll go for those two games on Saturday. I know a lot of people are trying to pick a team to support. There are a lot of great clubs. I’m a Koln sympathiser, have been for quite some time, and there are actually a lot of Scots who support them. The reason is obvious. If you’ve ever been in Cologne, it is just an amazing city. Maybe the friendliest city in Germany, full of a certain joie de vivre. And let’s face it, you can’t argue against supporting a club who have a live goat for their mascot. ‘Feel The Difference’ is their motto. I also regularly hear Scottish accents around the stadium when I go there to visit. And here’s the main clincher. The anthem they play at every game, always voted the No 1 anthem of any team in Germany, is the tune from Loch Lomond.
It was made famous by Runrig and they liked the tune so much in Germany — it was a big
hit — that Koln took it. They added words to it that are in the Kolsch dialect but the tune is the same. And anyone visiting from Scotland ends up going: ‘Hang on, that’s Loch Lomond!’ So I think that has to be the clincher for me. We’re all Koln fans now — that works for me. Support for the Bundesliga coming back isn’t universal in Germany. There’s a brilliant phrase they use there, where they talk about whether football deserves its ‘extrawurst’ — extra sausage. If you switch on German TV, you will get politicians who are in favour of the game coming back. But you also have the contra-argument articulated by a number of politicians who have become quite familiar to German viewers. They just think it’s too soon at a time when, although Germany is better off than most countries, it’s still not the case that you can just go and get a test whenever you want it. Most of the opinion polls at the moment show a slight advantage for those who think it’s too early for the Bundesliga to come back. But it is coming back. It is such a big fan culture and different fans have different feelings about it. The ultra groups are actually against the idea of these ghost games — geisterspiele — taking place. They feel you are riding roughshod over what football is. It is a sport for the fans. We would all say that. So most of the ultra groups are actually shunning these games; they want no part of them at all. But then you have the more silent group of football fans. They wouldn’t call themselves ultras — but they’re just looking forward to having the game back. It’s not going to be a perfect solution in Germany or any other league. It’s going to be a case of doing what you can, in a safe manner, week by week. Christian Seifert, the CEO of the DFL, said we go day by day, match by match. We get through one match day and hope to have the right for another match day. That will be how they approach it. The DFL is a very professional organisation. They realised very early on that, if they did want to come back and finish the Bundesliga season, everyone would have to be singing from the same hymn sheet — and there had to be an extremely well-thought-out plan. They have critics in Germany, of course. That’s going to be the case in any country with free speech. But they have gone to the nth degree to cover every possibility, as far as you can do that. There is no doubt that other leagues, other countries, even other sports have been looking at what has been done by the DFL — and viewing that as a kind of blueprint. It’s difficult for other countries because Germany is at a better stage of the process, in terms of dealing with Covid-19. You can’t just put this plan in place in a different country and expect it to work — it has to be at the right time. But there’s no question that they got politicians on side. It took a while, understandably, but they got enough at state and federal level to make it happen. In other countries, people are more positive about the Bundesliga returning because they see a sign of hope from Germany. As someone who is steeped in the Bundesliga, it’s maybe slightly disappointing that it’s happening with no fans in the stadium. But that’s where we are as a world at the moment.