BallHaus Ost – The flatulence of football officials

The ball is rolling again in the first Bundesliga after a short winter break. Because the lower leagues are still taking a break, I’m going to eat the big fish with the biggest teeth as a warm-up measure. Leverkusen played Dortmund against the Yellow Wall on Friday, which was impressive and looked like football.

1. FC Union Berlin is still part of the circle of blessed money machines that defend their place in the sun with all means against the clubs pressing down from below. But remember: a deserving Tyrannosaurus Rex like the HSV or the billy goats from Cologne are already pawing their hooves furiously and violently kicking their way up.

Solidarity has lost little to nothing in professional football, and Union now experiences this wisdom quite clearly. After the DFB ruling on the throw of a lighter from the block of active Köpenick fans against the head of the Bochum goalkeeper in the game between Berlin and Bochum, things are boiling in the offices of the Alte Försterei. Oberunioner Dirk Zingler rages disturbingly and is diligently assisted by his red and white employees. Even the cheerful Rhenish fringe Berliner, the New (Still?) Unioner Horst Heldt, is completely out of the box and shoelaces. The fan from the standing ranks also feels a great injustice in the football entertainment industry and lets his righteous anger run wild on (a)social media.

Ballhaus East

Imago/Matthias Koch

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

As you can hear, some combatants from the relegation segment of the Bundesliga are grumbling, but the big wave of Bundesliga outrage has so far failed to materialize. Why should the monster sharks from Munich, Leverkusen or Leipzig care about the mouths of the fish food? The Bundesliga works on the principle of eat or be eaten. It’s a ten minute drive to our hearts, thinks the inclined competitor in the aquarium of pain and opens the loudest sausage sheet with the big letters in order to wallow in the competition of the unimaginative clowns.

Friends, including the DFB, regularly teased by fans as a football mafia, will briefly puff out their cheeks in the tried and tested fashion of an official, only to immediately fall into their usual flatulence. But well, what should we expect from the men who have been kneading the galoshes of happiness in shielded, largely female-free small groups for many decades? Our football bureaucrats and determiners are stubborn old guys with no imagination or vision. It starts with the distribution of television money and extends to the strange form of punishment for clubs after so-called pyrotechnic incidents by fans.

In this respect, it is logical that 1. FC Union Berlin as a club has to bleed for the unsportsmanlike and idiotic act of a crazy supporter. Instead of surgically treating rotten spots in the system, the big EsWarAlwaysSo is invoked. My middle thesis: In a few days, Union’s rumbling belch will be thrown off and everything will remain as it was, is and will be forever.