Maxim Gorki has never seen the Bundesliga again. But the great poet somehow suspected what was going on in the upper room of German football, otherwise he would not have written the sombre sentence at the time: “After some conversations with people, you have the desire to pet a dog, smile at a monkey and in front of an elephant to pull the hat. “
The incidents of the past few days show what Gorki meant roughly, and they also confirm alarming studies and the assumption of Max Eberl, the manager of Borussia Mönchengladbach: According to this, one in 100 fans is so poorly supplied with blood that this deficiency leads to cerebellum paralysis – and the shortcomer is no longer able to follow even the simplest basic rules such as respect and tolerance.
How this one percent ticks in the audience has been known since last Thursday at the latest. Before Eintracht Frankfurt’s Europa League game against Red Bull Salzburg, the minute’s silence for the victims of Hanau’s gunman was interrupted by disgusting interjections. Also on Saturday at the game in Gladbach, the majority of the audience would have loved to empty their stomachs when a horde of derailed characters unfolded a “son of a bitch” transparency against Hoffenheim’s patron Dietmar Hopp, with his head in the middle of a crosshair. “For me,” said disgusted goalkeeper Oliver Baumann, “that’s a death threat.”
In any case, no variant of the persecution is now left out. In the evening at the game against Leipzig (0: 5), the goalkeeper Alexander Nübel was hit, one size smaller. Since he announced that he would overflow to FC Bayern in the summer, Nübel has been regarded as an evil and royal blue traitor like Manuel Neuer once was. With fear in the back of his neck, he then makes mistakes like now against Leipzig, and his own attachment makes life hell for him, with scorn and malicious applause. “We don’t need the whistles,” says sports director Jochen Schneider, but takes refuge in comfort: “There were relatively few.”
50 Gladbach horn oxen
There are always relatively few who salt the soup and mess up the best statement. “You turn against the game against racism and exclusion,” says Eberl in Gladbach, “and then 50 horn oxen hold up a poster like this.” When he ran into the curve with his captain Lars Stindl to deal with the crisis, he also had to be insulted. Eberl, half baffled, half stunned: “What I said there was also not without children. But what should I do with these people? “
Talk? To discuss? He might as well ask a sack of potatoes what time it is. Spontaneously George Best comes to mind. The unforgettable Northern Irishman was for a time the best right wing in the world at Manchester United, and as a no less crazy expert, he later claimed that the IQ of the English football idol Paul Gascoigne was lower than his shirt number – “What Gazza laughed and asked: Tell me, Georgie what is an IQ? “
What should you do? Eberl in Gladbach now asks and begs for assistance in identifying the perpetrators. “They are cowards, hide under the flag, put on masks and disappear under the protection of the crowd.” Eberl’s appeal to the rest of the fan curve: “With all due respect in your scene: say who it was! We saw in Münster that something like this is possible. ”When a deep-seated fanatic was recently carried away by the local Prussians against the Würzburg kickers to the roar of monkeys towards the player Leroy Kwadwo, his neighborhood in the stadium sent the law enforcement officers to him Neck.
It is the American way and it works. On the video board, for example, the basketball in the NBA is encouraged to inform the public about “Unruly fans” who misbehave. The request also flashes regularly in the NFL football arenas: “Report the interferers in your area, with a block and a seat.” You only have to send a short SMS to the fan police using your cell phone, and the chaos is picked up and, if necessary, in ankle cuffs dragged away.
At first glance, this recipe for success, especially for us Germans, takes some getting used to, but Antonio Rüdiger, our international at Chelsea, would perhaps welcome it. The dark-skinned Berliner is occasionally the target of racist insults, but when he reports an incident like this, the perpetrators usually get away with it, and afterwards he feels the revenge all the more painfully than Buhmann. Rüdiger complained to the broadcaster Sky Sport over the weekend: “I became a father on Thursday. But the way society looks today, most likely my child will still suffer from it. For me, Hanau is the end product – first Torunarigha, then Kwadwo, and then there are dead people. “
Jordan Torunarigha, the Berlin Hertha player, was recently insulted by Schalke racists during the cup game. The good news: the masses are showing their colors, the cohesion of civil courage is growing, with loud signals like “Ultras out!” And “Nazis out!”. Alexander Rosen, Hoffenheim’s sports director, was delighted in Gladbach on Saturday: “This sign of many people against the intellectual contempt for fewer idiots is greater than the sown hatred.”
The resistance positions itself. It was also seen by the referee in Gladbach on Saturday. “It will only continue when the poster is no longer visible,” said Felix Brych, and he was clearly ready to have his announcement culminate in the headlines “Brych breaks off” if necessary. “If the poster doesn’t go away, we’ll go home,” said Hoffenheim coach Alfred Schreuder.
The message is clear: up to here and no further. The troublemakers in the stadium should be taught in social ruling that neither racism nor reputation killing is a human right covered by the freedom of fools, just as the stadium is not a legal space. The well-known football lawyer Christoph Schickhardt says: “Thank God the police have a monopoly on the use of force in the state. Only in certain cases should she make intensive and consistent use of this exclusive right. The mask has to be torn off such figures, they don’t belong in the stadium, but in custody. “
Schickhardt is not one of those who consider criminal law to be an indispensable part of the colorful fan culture. It is therefore no coincidence that he represents Hoffenheim’s patron Hopp. It is thick with chaos and therefore more and more busy with the dishes. The first punitive orders have long been legally binding, with about 4800 euros you can quickly get there as a dirty slayer from the cheap places.
On Saturday 50 more horned oxen applied. And Max Eberl is like Maxim Gorki once: every hour his desire to have a beer with a real ox grows.
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