Jumping on a bandwagon

Or how I tried to become a fan of a German football team that I didn't know existed four years ago

One advantage of being a soccer fan is that you can develop a multiplicity of fandoms since pretty much every country has its own league and only in a few occasions do you ever have to worry about getting caught in a situation where your loyalties clash. So, in addition to being a supporter of Everton in England, I also root for a team in Germany’s Bundesliga, 1. FC Union Berlin, familiarly called Union Berlin and pronounced with an “oo” sound at the beginning of Union instead of “you” as it does in English.¹

The Bundesliga has only been around since 1963 and, has been dominated by one team, Bayern Munich, which was won the league championship 31 times. Union Berlin did not qualify for the top level of the Bundesliga until 2019. There were two reasons for this:

1. The team is a small club that plays in a small stadium and has had hard time keeping high quality talent.

2. For most of the team’s existence, it was in EAST Berlin, as in EAST Germany, so it couldn’t play in the Bundesliga anyway.

Union was founded in 1966 and it was supposed to be “the people’s club.” Now it could be problematic to say that a team founded in a Communist Country is anymore of a “people’s club” than any other, but there is some truth to it. There were for many years, two big clubs in East Berlin. The other was called Dynamo Berlin and it was sponsored by the Stasi, the East German secret police. Union Berlin may have been a product of a Communist system, but its supporters were not people who were spying on the private activities of people who were just minding their own business. Not many people in Germany miss the Stasi.

After reunification, Union became more successful than Dynamo, which folded in 1991. But, Union was always beset by financial difficulties and frequently had to rely on its own season ticket holders to chip in more to keep the team afloat. The supporters also helped to renovate the team’s stadium, Stadion An der Alten Försterei (Stadium at the Old Forester’s House.)

The name comes from its location next to a forest. Not that I knew there were forests in Berlin, as my images of the city either come from “Cabaret” or a bunch of very bleak-looking German films. But this satellite photo from Google Maps shows that there is indeed a forest in Berlin.

The stadum holds 22,000 fans, but there are only 3,600 seats, so most of the fans stand through the match, which is common in Germany. Similar to LAFC’s BMO Stadium, there are railings to keep the fans from crowding together unsafely.

Union’s fans are quite passionate. When the team finally earned a promotion to the top level of the Bundesliga after winning a 2019 playoff against Stuggart, the fans entered the pitch, although it was relatively calm. (There are a lot of instances when the fans have been less than peaceful. Or just downright disgusting.) The fans have an unfortunate tendency to shoot off fireworks during matches and either sending them on to the field or into the fans of the opposing team. The team describes its supporters as “different, non-conformist, individual.”

The team has two main rivals. One is the West Berlin team, Hertha Berlin, who are not particularly good. The other is RB Leipzig, which is the only other team in the Bundesliga that plays in the former East Germany. RB Leipzig became very successful very fast after the Red Bull sports drink company started bankrolling it (they also sponsor teams in Salzburg, Austria, and Harrison, New Jersey.) German football fans do not like it when teams become good in a short period of time because it found a wealthy benefactor. RB Leipzig and 1899 Hoffenheim (another team that went from zero to 100 overnight) have been the subject of protests by German fans even at matches when those teams weren’t playing.

Union finished 11th in its first season in the Bundesliga. The next year, th eteam moved up to 7th and qualified to play in last year’s Europa Conference League, but didn’t make it out of group play.

Last season, Union finished in fifth place and missed a Champions League spot by one point. The Eisern (it means Irons and is the common nickname for Union) came up one point short of catchingl RB Leipzig. Union Berlin is playing in the Europa League (Europe’s NIT) and will face another Union, Union Saint-Gilloise of Belgium in the round of 16.

Union Berlin was briefly in first place this season and the Bundesliga for one week had an unusual three-way tie among Union, Bayern Munich, and Borussia Dortmund. Union played at Bayern on February 26 with a chance to take over first place by itself, but lost 3-0 in a match that showed that the difference in talent between Bayern and Union was enormous. Union doesn’t score a lot of goals and plays a counterattacking style, so if the team falls behind early, it is fairly hard to come back. But the team is almost always well-organized and well-disciplined.

There are some very glaring things that show that I may not be a diehard fan.

1. I don’t always watch the matches on TV. The Bundesliga is mostly shown on ESPN+ and that can be harder to remember to check than the English Premier League which is distributed mostly on the USA Network and NBC. There is a lot more friction involved in finding Bundesliga matches on TV. ESPN covers the matches remotely, so you never quite get the full crowd experience.

2. I really should know who the players are better. The team churns through players quite quickly because of its small budget (think Tampa Bay Rays), so it’s often hard to keep track of who is on the team. The team’s leading goal scorer is Sherlado Becker, who hails from Suriname, a South American country that is so bad at football that it plays internationally in North America. There is one American player on the team, Jordan Pefok, who was born in Washington of Cameroonian parents and grew up in France.

3. I am unlikely to ever attend a match in person and probably would not be up for the experience of standing for two hours among 22,000 German football fans. As I am both old and sober.

Nevertheless, I am tempted to become an official “member” of the team. It only costs 10 Euros!

Whatever I decide, I still can revel in the bizarro writing style of the English language game summaries that the team posts on its website. The following selection comes from a description of the team’s scoreless draw against FC Köln.

The pitch showed yellowing stripes from its midweek relaying, a divot on Union’s inside right channel appeared immediately like a volcano rising out of the southern pacific, a crater appeared  by the left hand touchline. However, it remained largely true, despite its appearance, the biggest scars being the ones left by the thundering challenges.

For it was a battle in places down there.

The FC Union Berlin pregame

1. I was debating putting more German language in this piece until I realized that I really don’t know much German except what it takes to find a bathroom, get a check in a restaurant, or to say that I don’t speak much German.