Fans vs politicians: The battle for German football’s soul
After weeks of fan protests and furious debate, German state ministers meet this week to discuss controversial new stadium security proposals. For some, the future of the national game is at stake.
Last weekend, the stands fell silent once again. At Bundesliga stadiums across Germany, the opening 12 minutes of Saturday and Sunday’s games were greeted with a stony hush. There were no songs, no flags, no drums and very definitely no fireworks. There was just silence. Furious, deafening silence.
For years, when German football fans have had a grievance, this has been their preferred method of dissent. Silent protests - or “atmosphere boycotts” - send a quick and powerful message: This is what the game would be like without us, so listen to our demands. In the last decade, they have been used to protest everything from ticket prices to Red Bull.
This time, though, the protesters’ ire was directed not at club directors or slick corporate investors, but at the state. And as far as the fans are concerned at least, the stakes have never been so high.
From Wednesday to Friday this week, the interior ministers of Germany’s 16 federal states will meet at their biannual conference (IMK). Among the issues on the agenda is a series of proposals to reform security and policing at major football stadiums. They include the introduction of personalised tickets, the use of surveillance cameras with AI-powered facial recognition software and a drastic reform of the way stadium bans are imposed. For the politicians, these measures are part of a long overdue move to combat fan violence. For the fans - and many other critics - they are a full-blown attack on the very soul of German football.
For weeks now, fans across the country have been united in relentless protest against the IMK proposals. As well as silent protests, a nationwide petition and direct appeals to interior ministers, there have also been street demonstrations in various major cities. In mid-November, around 20,000 fans from dozens of different fan groups assembled in Leipzig to demonstrate ahead of Germany’s World Cup qualifier against Slovakia. Putting aside their bitter local rivalries, fans from teams marched side by side behind a common message. As the banner in front of them read: “Football is safe: No to populism! Yes to fan culture!”
Fan culture is a gloriously vague term. Yet the strength of feeling comes from the fact that German fans really do have something tangible to lose. However commercialised the modern game has become, German football still clings to certain things which have long been swept away in other countries like Spain and England. There is fan democracy - albeit indirect - via the 50+1 rule. There are affordable tickets and old-fashioned standing terraces. And as a result, there are the raucous atmospheres and the huge, diverse ultra groups who deliver them.
It is easy to see why the ultra groups, in particular, would consider the IMK proposals a threat to all this. Ultra culture is, by definition, about pushing the boundaries of the socially acceptable and prioritising the collective over the individual. Measures such as personalised tickets and facial recognition are designed to increase individual accountability. You don’t have to pick a side to see that one is anathema to the other.
Yet as much as certain politicians would like to paint it as such, this is not a simple battle between the forces of law and order and a fanatical minority. Other fan groups and even the clubs and the league themselves have also been largely unanimous in their scepticism. From St. Pauli to Bayern Munich, club directors have come out to question the practicality and even the legality of the proposed measures.
Again, there is vested interest here. In a competitive European market, a vibrant fan culture is the Bundesliga’s main ace in the hole, the thing that differentiates it from objectively stronger and more exciting brands like La Liga or the Premier League. Under the highly successful slogan “Football As It’s Meant To Be”, the league has built its entire identity on the idea that fans are treated fairly. Those campaign videos might lose a little impact if, in the drumbeat montages of flag-waving, adrenalin-soaked terraces, there is also an AI-surveillance camera lurking in the back of the shot.
Yet even that is not the point. Because in truth, the strength of German fan culture are not its aesthetic qualities (which are, after all, a matter of taste), but its decentralisation of power and influence. As the nationwide supporter association Unsere Kurve put it in a statement on Monday: “More than flags and pyrotechnics, fan culture in Germany is above all about dialogue. Almost everything that happens in the stadium is the result of different people speaking to each other and reaching agreements and compromises. Week on week, regionally, nationally and internationally.”
In other countries, that dialogue is either non-existent or a largely top-down relationship between paying customers and all-powerful club owners. In Germany, it is a sprawling mesh of interest groups, from social workers and community projects at one end to millionaire agents and corporate sponsors at the other. Part of the reason the standing terrace is so beloved in Germany is because it is an expression of this dynamic: a broad space in which people organise and regulate themselves, with minimal prescription from above.
Many of the proposals on the table this week are a threat to that dynamic. Personalised tickets may seem a banal issue, but they have pernicious side effects, making it harder for fans to swap tickets amongst themselves and for clubs to allocate en masse to established fan groups. At clubs with deep local roots, those are important mechanisms to ensure existing fan communities aren’t gentrified out of their own stadiums.
Even more controversial are the proposals on stadium bans. Alarmingly, these even include automatic, three-month bans on fans even suspected of committing an offence, something which many critics argue is against the rule of law. The idea that bans should be imposed by a national arbitration body has also caused uproar. Without local expertise, the concern is that bans will be imposed far less discerningly, once again eroding trust between fans and authorities.
Trust, in the end, is the key issue here. Can football and football fans be trusted to sort out their own affairs? Hardliner politicians argue that they clearly can’t, claiming clubs do not have issues such as pyrotechnic use under control and pointing to outbreaks of violence and vandalism, especially around local derbies.
Yet as fans and football administrators have consistently pointed out in the last few weeks, the cold hard figures show a different story. A recent report published by the IMK’s own monitoring organisation ZIS showed that, while attendances have increased in the top three divisions over the past year, the number of criminal incidents and the number of injuries recorded in stadiums is going down.
Hence the accusations of populism which have been hung from every stadium fence in the country in recent weeks. There is a sense, not unjustifiably, that this is a crisis cooked up out of nothing, with a target audience of those outside of football. “The politicians are generalising because they lack expertise”, sniffed Unsere Kurve on Monday.
That, in turn, hints at an even deeper concern: namely the erosion of Germany’s democratic culture per se. For years, the Federal Republic prided itself on a lack of polarisation, a culture of coalition-building and compromise, where good policy making and the balance of interests were more important than political point-scoring. The IMK, a platform for inter-state coordination on national issues, is ironically an example of that culture. Yet as populist parties continue to grow and centrist coalitions continue to squabble, there are many who fear those principles are getting lost.
For now at least, the democratic culture is still alive and kicking in football. Fan protests have been highly effective on a number of issues in recent years, and they may prove so again. On Tuesday, Kicker reported that many of the IMK’s proposals had already been watered down following lengthy negotiations with the DFL and the DFB. Yet whatever comes out of this week’s meeting, it will not be the end of the story. The fight for the soul of German football will rage on for a long time yet.
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