I’m not going to lie. A small amount of schadenfreude was among the mixed emotions triggered by the news that Bayern Munich has missed out on the Bundesliga title this year and underdog Bayer Leverkusen became German football champions for the first time.
Since the country’s top football league, the Bundesliga, was founded in West Germany in 1963, Bayern Munich have won it 32 times. That includes every single one of the last eleven years. An entire generation of German children has grown up thinking that to watch German football is to watch Bayern win.
It’s not that I have a particular antipathy towards Bayern Munich. But where’s the fun in watching a competition in which the winner is practically set before the games have even begun? It’s bad for football and bad for Germany.
Football is still the national sport, deeply entrenched in the collective psyche and intertwined with the country’s post-war history. It’s also one of the few outlets for displays of national unity. When West Germany won its first World Cup in 1954, this so-called ‘miracle of Bern’ was an enormous psychological boost less than a decade after the Second World War. East Germans enjoyed their own competitive football leagues accompanied by strong rivalries that became part of the cultural fabric of society.
After reunification, the seemingly guaranteed success of the national team made the years in which European Championships or World Cups were played magical experiences. My childhood in the 1990s featured many summers in which TVs were dragged out into gardens and matches became social events in which one suffered or rejoiced together with friends and neighbours.
When the 2006 World Cup was hosted by Germany, the whole country seemed transformed. Supermarkets were full of merchandise in the national tricolour. Cars, buildings, streets – everything was black-red-and-gold. While Germany only came third, the euphoric atmosphere of the tournament is fondly remembered as the ‘fairytale summer’.
But the Bundesliga was less magical, certainly for people like me who had absolutely nothing to do with its dominating teams. Throughout most of my time at school in the 1990s and early 2000s, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund fought over the top spots. One was 600km to the south, the other almost as far to the west. Both had been in a different country at the time I was born.
I had nothing against Munich or Dortmund as cities. I was fascinated to explore the Bavarian capital on a school trip, including its Olympiastadion which was still the home of Bayern Munich then. And I had a pen pal from Dortmund whom I saw once a year and got one with very well. But neither connection was enough to build continuous interest in the doings of their respective football clubs. I looked on with bewilderment as some classmates began to view football as a thing where you decide if you like Bayern or Dortmund (often by their colours) and then collect paraphernalia in the form of pencil cases and stationery.
But there were few alternatives. East Germany’s football teams had struggled to survive in the Bundesliga for a number of reasons. There were only ever a maximum of two eastern clubs in the Bundesliga and I didn’t feel ‘East German’ enough to support them out of principle.
With the GDR its local sports infrastructure collapsed too. I found the offering of competitive sports for girls particularly lacking in the rural area east of Berlin where I grew up. A male friend eventually convinced me to come along to his (all-male) volleyball club. I turned out to be adequate (despite being very short) and the club obtained special permission to let me play as part of its boys’ team in regional tournaments. Naturally, with so few options, there was no football club I could have joined.
So with no reason at all to feel invested in football between international tournaments, I was completely detached from the sport for the two-year intervals in between. This may seem an extreme example, but Germany’s federal culture, its size and its huge cultural variation would have made it difficult for other young people to engage with a sport where the only teams with a chance at the title are so far away as to have no meaning.
I doubt the fact that Bayern alone emerged as the dominant club over the last decade has helped matters. How is a child in Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin or Frankfurt, never mind all the smaller towns and villages across the country, supposed to get excited about elite football? Okay, they can buy a Bayern gym bag and cheer in front of the television, but they’ll never enjoy the strange collective exuberance of a community winning a sporting event together.
That’s not to say that regional football doesn't have its own merits beyond the Bundesliga. There are strong club cultures attached to lower-league teams. I witnessed this for myself at university in Jena, which was formerly part of the GDR. Its football club FC Carl Zeiss Jena is one such example. Older fans would never tire of telling me about the team’s East German glory days. Younger fans were exhilarated to find their team had gone up into the second tier, just one below the Bundesliga, in 2006. It was tough up there for the team, but enormous fun to watch. My student friends were somehow mostly from Jena as were their parents. To stand among entire generations of fans on the terraces was quite something. Deafening noise, adults crying when their team lost, a tenner for a ticket at the turnstile. It was football from another era. Unfortunately, so were levels of violence at times, particularly when Jena played their arch-rivals Erfurt.
Whether Bayern’s failure to win the title this year will lead to a more diverse football landscape remains to be seen, but Bayer Leverkusen have already created hope with their victory against the odds. There has long been a debate about how best to revive youth engagement with football in Germany. Dethroning Bayern isn’t the answer but it might well help.
Yes there is nothing quite like sport sport to bring a community across its age span together .. I would never have thought much about the impact of Bayern's success on local sport in Germany.. until now.. here in Ireland , soccer, as many here call it , is no where near the professional standard of England, so strange as it may seem given our centuries long independence struggle, many Irish passionately follow English Premier League teams. But, we do have our own national sports of Hurling and Gaelic Football which attracts massive match attendances across the island to the All Ireland Championships in which the individual 32 counties compete ..and below that there there is a complex matrix of local or 'parish' clubs where literally hundreds of thousands of men and women, boys and girls compete weekly.. initially part of the independence movement, the Gaelic Athletic Association is a root and branch voluntary organisation that is part of the fabric of every local community .. and yes, as you describe, to stand on the terraces on a Sunday at either a local club game or an Inter-County Hurling or Football Championship game (its a totally amateur sport at even the highest level) is to experience all ages, all genders, neighbours and families united in the heightened emotion of cheering your 'own' to the success of victory ... nothing I know compares. You might try watch the All Ireland Hurling Final with a capacity 83,000 rival supporters in Croke Park, Dublin sometime .. its a unique experience of ... its available online outside Ireland ... indeed any pub in the UK frequented by the Irish Community will be watching it ..this year its on 21st July.
Full disclosure I am not a football fan and I have never understood the well nigh idolatrous relationship some to the game. Get you, challenging the orthodoxy playing on a male volleyball team!