Pitch Publishing, £12.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 407, March 2021
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Stories
For the first time the second tier will have more title winners than the top division
5 August ~ For the first time ever, Bundesliga 2 hosts a higher number of former national champions than the top division. Tonight, Kaiserslautern and Hannover 96 contest the inaugural match of the new season. A pairing like that wouldn’t look out of the place in the Bundesliga given that those two sides share no less than six national championships between them. Indeed, preceding the set-up of the Bundesliga, Kaiserslautern and Hannover met in the 1954 national final, the rank outsiders from the north thumping their more illustrious opponents 5-1.
Uli Hesse on the fraught play-offs to reach the Second Bundesliga in 1991
4 June ~ Twenty-five years ago Hansa Rostock won the last-ever East German cup final, but that wasn’t the end of football in the GDR. After the German reunification, East German teams were distributed into the West German league pyramid. When the Bundesliga was formed in 1963 the clubs were admitted base on a ranking calculated over the previous 12 years, yet for the teams in the GDR’s Oberliga, it came down to how they performed over just one season.
Karsten Blaas explains how indecision over fireworks at German football matches has caused fights between ultras and police on the terraces
For their live coverage of the second round of the German cup, played in late October, the TV station ZDF chose Borussia Dortmund’s encounter with Dynamo Dresden, east Germany’s best supported team, who are now back in the second tier after a decade of decline. What happened on the pitch was as dull as had been expected. Dortmund won a lacklustre game 2-0. The events on the terraces and outside the ground, however, had a long-term impact, raising questions about police tactics and the role of the ultra movement in German football.
Paul Joyce studies how the Berlin Wall divided the city arbitrarily and changed the lives of clubs, players and fans
Although post-war Germany was divided into two states in 1949, football clubs on both sides of the border were determined to maintain sporting relations. Despite political tensions between capitalist West Germany (FRG) and the socialist East (GDR), numerous cross-border friendlies took place on public holidays in the early 1950s. These proved massively popular with supporters on both sides of the divide. In October 1956, 110,000 East German fans filled the new Leipzig Zentralstadion to watch 1.FC Kaiserslautern, whose team contained five players from West Germany’s 1954 World Cup-winning side, beat SC Wismut Karl-Marx-Stadt 5-3.