Football in the East: Regionalliga Northeast: Left behind, but league of the heart

Every year the year tends towards the abyss. Berlin is covered in gray, the lower-class games are canceled because no groundskeeper can operate his snow shovel when the temperature drops below zero. So we are an inner emigration and let the most beautiful moments of the year pass us by in slow motion. The Regional League of the Heart offers everything we need: a hateman with Cucumber King Wollitz, the best bratwurst in the world in Meuselwitz, mostly talent-free players with a lot of enthusiasm and powerful fighting hearts. Occasionally a good NOFV kicker turns into an alien. To enchant us for a few seconds with his left glue so that we remember past successes, championships, European Cup games.

Ballhaus East

Photo: Anne Hahn

Frank Willman looks at the football between Leipzig, Łódź and Ljubljana.

Next to the pitch: passionate shouting and shouting, of course also pyrotechnics. The championship title and the associated promotion to the 3rd league has become a long way off for fans of Carl Zeiss Jena. The beloved games against old rivals such as Vieselbach, Energie Cottbus, BFC Dynamo, Chemie and Lok Leipzig, Zwickau and Chemnitz remain. All promising mini-dramas that, as a fan of lower-class football, are already shining brightly out of the mousy gray of 2024. With somnambulistic confidence I find the venues of my favorite opponents. Yes, I love them all and hate them like the plague. Greifswald is currently at the top, but the newcomer comes from either Cottbus or Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. It almost doesn’t matter to me who can ultimately play a round in third division football. The main thing is that it is one of the clubs that has driven me crazy since I was a child.

East Germany is still left behind in terms of football. I see little reason to believe that this could change in the next few years. Union Berlin already has one foot in the second division in league one. Magdeburg and Rostock are already struggling there. Dresden will try its luck in the 3rd league and maybe make it to promotion. Aue is stagnating and Halle is fighting against relegation. Of the 56 professional clubs, just six come from the East. That doesn’t sound like a good rate. Eastern football is weak and has a dull guy at its head in Hermann Winkler from Saxony. His lame fight for direct promotion to the 3rd league from the East is amateurish. In many stadiums you can find stickers with Winkler’s likeness as a statement, with the saying: Not my president. Basically, any word about his mismanagement is one too many.

Some people from East Germany consider the marketing product RasenBallsport Leipzig or Hertha BSC to be Eastern clubs. At Hertha you could perhaps turn a blind eye. Regarding the existing Red Bull project, there can only be one answer: Leipzig is chemistry and locomotive.

Because some of you still need gifts, I would like to recommend two really great products at the end of the year: honest football prose and history from the hoard of love-crazed bone crushers as well as Viennese Ballesterer combo quality beyond the 11 Friends crawling joke prose cosmos. Do good and buy. The proceeds from the first book, for example, go towards maintaining the sports park.

Alexander Mennicke: Leutzsch Sports Park – Over 100 years of the Alfred Kunze Sports Park, 2 volumes. BSG Chemie Leipzig e. V. (ed.), 784 pages, born €59. Can be ordered online in the chemistry fan shop.
50 years of the Bundesliga. ballesterer library #3, €14. Can be ordered in shop.ballesterer.at

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