FRANKFURT — There is a single black flag where the heart of the Commerzbank Arena should be. All around it, in the stadium’s Kurve, the terraces that are ordinarily home to Eintracht Frankfurt’s most ardent and raucous fans are empty. Exposed, they are just concrete: desolate, silent and gray.
The flag, a couple dozen rows high, looms behind the goal posts in the middle of the space. Just a black flag, inscribed with one word — Montag — scored out by a red circle and a slash.
No Mondays.
The campaign has now been running for nearly three years. It has been taken up not only by Eintracht’s ultras, but by their counterparts at clubs across Germany. The fans do not believe Bundesliga games should be held on Monday nights — a sign, they say, of broadcasting schedules being given priority over match-going fans — and so they have done all they can to show their displeasure.
The protests have taken various forms: volleys of tennis balls being thrown onto the field; pointed, pregnant silences; and — as in this case — banners and walkouts. It is a message that has been heard. In 2018, the Bundesliga confirmed that when it signs its next round of television agreements there will be no more Monday night games. The protests, though, have continued. “There is no trust in the governing bodies,” said Michael Gabriel, the head of Germany’s Fan Project Coordination Center.
The battle had been won, but for the fans, that is not the end of it. “There is a sense that they have to keep fighting, or they might lose everything,” Gabriel said. The banner left by Frankfurt’s absent ultras had another purpose: It was a chance to remind the authorities exactly where the power lies in German soccer.
Crossing a Line
While Eintracht and Union Berlin played through the fans’ protest on a Monday last month, at least four Bundesliga matches in the last two weeks have been halted because of a different kind of banner in the stands.
The first, unveiled during a game between Borussia Mönchengladbach and TSG Hoffenheim, showed an image of Dietmar Hopp — a billionaire software magnate and Hoffenheim’s benefactor — with his face within a set of cross hairs. Mönchengladbach’s captain, Lars Stindl, and its sporting director, Max Eberl, pleaded with the club’s fans to remove it, so the game could continue.
On Saturday, Bayern Munich traveled to Sinsheim — the town where Hoffenheim plays its home games — and, with the visitors winning 6-0, its fans unfurled another banner directed toward Hopp.
Again, the game was paused. Again, various dignitaries, including Bayern’s coach and sporting director, urged their fans to remove the banner. When the final few minutes of the game were played, the players refused to engage: They passed the ball to each other, going through the motions, whiling away time.
Afterward, Fritz Keller, the president of the German soccer federation, known as the D.F.B., decried the incident as a “disaster.” The ultras had gone too far, he said. Germany had “reached its lowest point.”
And yet that is not how the fans displaying the flags saw it. To them, this was a cause worth a fight. Bayern and Mönchengladbach fans were not, particularly, protesting Hopp.
Hopp is not a popular figure among many of Germany’s more engaged fans. He has bankrolled Hoffenheim, a village team, all the way to the Champions League, by running contrary to the ownership model — the so-called 50+1 rule, in which clubs cannot be majority owned by an individual — that many in Germany hold dear.
But he has also been around for a while; there is no reason for Bayern’s Südkurve ultras, for example, to take particular exception to him now.
No, the protests were directed at the D.F.B. Last month, the organization confirmed that fans of Borussia Dortmund would be banned from seeing their team at Hoffenheim for the next two years because of their persistent abuse of Hopp. They had been given a suspended sentence for the same offense in 2018. They had violated it earlier this season. This was their punishment.
But, as Gabriel explained, the D.F.B. had previously said it “would try to move away from collective punishments for fans. But what happened to Dortmund, he said, “is a collective punishment.”
Bayern and the others — last weekend, there were similar banners and interruptions to games at Cologne and Union Berlin — were acting in “solidarity” with their fellow fans, as a statement from the Südkurve put it. Banning Dortmund, it said, “crossed a line.”
“There is a common understanding that the fans play a part in the game,” Gabriel said. “They expect to play an active role. And they know that the only way to win battles is to unite.”
Against the System
The origins of Germany’s modern, empowered fan culture can be traced to Bremen, almost 30 years ago. In the early 1990s, when the club announced plans to remodel its stadium to eliminate standing terraces — to meet the requirements for modern arenas set by European soccer’s governing body — the proposals were met with a furious backlash from the club’s fans.
Eventually, the protests paid off: Bremen agreed to design a stadium in consultation with fans, and the D.F.B. signed off. Since 1994, German stadiums have been permitted to incorporate so-called safe standing sections. “It was a major success,” said Gabriel, who was involved in the birth of the organized fan scene in Germany. “It gave the fans participation in the decisions that affect them.”
Now, fans are represented by several umbrella organizations that help them to act in unison — including the Fan Projects, of which Gabriel is a part, and Unsere Kurve (Our Curves) — and they use that voice on any and all issues that they feel threaten the culture they have worked to foster: kickoff times are set to accommodate television, how fans — regardless of club colors — are treated, how games are policed.
Perhaps the subject that brings them together most, though — and the one that makes people like Hopp, or clubs like Red Bull-financed RB Leipzig, so broadly unpopular — is the 50+1 rule itself. It is the defining characteristic of German soccer, and the mechanism that gives fans in the country their power.
“This is something we already have, and people want to protect it,” said Robin Krakau, a fan of Hannover and one of the leaders of the club’s ProVerein1896 movement. It was formed to ensure Hannover did not become one of the few permitted exceptions to the 50+1 rule (both Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg are, officially, “works” teams, and with their longtime corporate benefactors have different ownership structures).
For years, Hannover’s longstanding president, Martin Kind, had been lobbying to be allowed to take full control of the club, even going so far as to threaten to test the legality of the 50+1 rule in the European Court. Krakau and others set up their group to ensure that did not happen, and that fans remained in control. They protested in the stadium. They demonstrated on the city’s streets. And they lobbied the D.F.B.
It did not matter to them if Kind’s intentions were pure, or if he might have been the best owner the club could have wanted. “We were against the idea of him,” Krakau said. “We were against the system.
“If you give away a club to a private owner, you do not know what happens in the future. If regulations change, maybe they sell it. Who do they sell it to? For active fans, that is not worth the risk. Money can be a reason for success, but there is not a 100 percent correlation. And if you are dependent on one person, one company, and they leave, what happens then?”
Not all of Hannover’s fans appreciated the protests — “after a while, a lot of people just want to watch football,” Krakau said. But in March 2018, a petition expressing support for 50+1, signed by some 3,000 fan groups, was handed to the D.F.B.
A couple months later, Kind’s final bid to take control of Hannover was rejected, in part because of evidence provided by ProVerein1896. Last year, Kind and his supporters were largely ousted from the club’s board. Krakau is confident that Kind will not pursue his takeover attempts any further. But he fears “the system of Martin Kind,” as he called it, the threat to 50+1 as a whole, remains.
For the Fans, but Which Fans?
Outside the Commerzbank Arena, a small stage has been set up. This is the Waldtribüne — the Forest Tribune — organized by Eintracht Frankfurt’s museum. It is a place where Eintracht fans, and a representative of the team’s opponent that day, can meet to discuss various issues affecting German soccer.
Previous guests have included players, coaches and even Axel Hellmann, once a founder of an Eintracht supporters club, and now the team’s chief executive. On this night, though, the guest is a member of Union Berlin’s fan group.
The visitor is given a warm reception, and chats with two hosts about a number of topics — the Dortmund ban, how promotion to the Bundesliga has changed Union Berlin fans’ relationship with their club — before he is applauded off and replaced by a man who has produced an Eintracht Frankfurt sticker album.
It is admirable, and sincere, and appreciated by the hundred or so fans, clutching beers, who have stopped to listen. But it is intriguing to note that a majority of the audience, like the people onstage, are of Gabriel’s generation — he once played on Eintracht’s youth teams with Liverpool Manager Jürgen Klopp — and are, generally, men.
That is not to say this is the only demographic represented by the active fan movement in Germany — the ultras, in particular, skew much younger — and it is not to play down their achievements. “It is the fan groups who often highlight issues around fighting extremism, racism, sexism and homophobia,” Gabriel said. “It is a positive fan culture.”
It is pressure from these organizations that has meant every German club has, in order to get its license to compete, to employ three people specifically to maintain a dialogue with the fan groups.
But whether the priorities of the groups that make most use of their voice are always the priorities of the majority is harder to gauge. That the fans have power, and that it works, is clear; the vast black flag and the empty Kurve in Frankfurt stand as testament to that. After next season, there will be no more games on Monday nights in Germany. That was, Gabriel said, a line in the sand.
But the question lingers: What about people who like watching soccer on a Monday night?
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
