This European Championship team was too diverse for a fifth of all Germans. And that didn’t just apply to their jerseys.
Photo: imago/Contrast
When Rudi Völler was appointed sports director of the men’s national team by the German Football Association in January 2023, the right-wing football community rejoiced and dreamed of a political and cultural rollback in the DFB, which was supposedly so “left-green and dirty”. Also thanks to some populist sayings from the ex-world champion, who, at his debut, spoke robustly about gender, climate activists and of course the rainbow armband. The latter was ultimately blamed by the right for the failure at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. “The crisis in German football is a consequence of its politicization by the DFB,” wrote the AfD magazine “First”.
But the enthusiasm soon gave way to disillusionment. The rainbow armband disappeared for the men, but there was now an away jersey in pink and purple. On the Internet, the right-wing complained that the jersey was “un-German,” “gay,” an expression of “woke idiocy,” and so on. “Bild” columnist Franz Josef Wagner was even certain: “Franz Beckenbauer would never have worn something like that.”
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Rudi Völler, on the other hand, liked the jersey. The former world champion also backtracked somewhat when it came to the political commitment of national players: “When I played in Bremen in the early 1980s, the peace movement, which I supported with benevolence, was gaining strength. A player has to be able to think about something like that,” he told the magazine “11 Freunde”. Just please don’t exaggerate.
The political embrace of the national team has a tradition, especially in conservative and right-wing extremist circles. The Nazi regime had officially discredited the politicization of sport. It was still being done behind the scenes. Of course, football was also “Aryanized.” In 1984, Helmut Kohl became the first chancellor since Adolf Hitler to visit the dressing room of the national team. The intellectual and moral change propagated by the CDU man did not stop at the team: from then on, the players sang along to the national anthem before international matches. Kohl’s penetrating instrumentalization of the national team strengthened many leftists and alternatives in their already existing attitude that they should keep their hands off their fellow citizens’ favorite child.
Since then, however, a lot has changed in the relationship between the left and the right and the national team. This now ultimately represents the society that the right fights against on a daily basis. The team is perhaps even further ahead than large parts of Germany when it comes to dealing with inclusion and diversity. Both bring the DFB team sympathy from the left, while they are punished by withdrawal of love from the right.
Even before the 2018 World Cup, the radical right had withdrawn its support from the DFB team. The fascist Björn Höcke found that they were now just as “colorful” as all first and second-class European club teams. Until the DFB is “back in patriotic hands,” he is “enjoying what remains of my old football world.” From then on, Höcke’s sympathies were with the Icelanders, probably because of their perceived “Aryan” appearance.
When the then national coach Joachim Löw did without midfielder Mesut Özil in the second group game against Sweden in the course of the photo drama with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Alice Weidel posted: “AfD works!” What she meant was that racist bullying worked.
Before the 2024 European Championship, the right was hoping for a repeat of that drama. This time it wasn’t a photo with a Turkish autocrat, but a message from the black central defender Antonio Rüdiger on Instagram. He wished his followers a happy Ramadan. However, the former “Bild” boss Julian Reichelt discovered a supposedly Islamist gesture in the photo, while like-minded people were outraged about the alleged “Africanization of domestic football” or a “multi-cultural team with an ever-decreasing proportion of Germans.” The fact that the DFB team was neither overwhelmed by the expectation of bringing the country back together with inspiring performances nor by the right’s hopes that they would fail speaks for themselves.
After the sporting disaster in Qatar, there were often calls for the depoliticization of football – especially from the right, who, however, only disapproved of the direction and content of the politicization. But it was far too late for that. “It is time for a turning point in German football and in society,” announced Philipp Lahm, managing director of the European Championship organizers. The tournament must be seen as a “turning point” “for Europe, for society, for all of us.” Values such as democracy and freedom, diversity and tolerance, integration and inclusion should be strengthened and celebrated. The EM 2024 as a counter-proposal to Qatar 2022?
Lahm was hoping for a summer fairy tale 2.0. At the same time, he was aware that the host country had changed dramatically since 2006. After all, the right-wingers rejoiced at the time that the masses of fans were “finally wearing black, red and gold again.” Today they are strangers to the team and therefore also to its millions of fans.
It wasn’t a summer fairy tale, that much was clear on the final weekend. The division in society is real, which was confirmed by the WDR survey before the tournament, according to which 21 percent of Germans wanted more national players with white skin. At the press conference after Germany’s exit from the tournament, national coach Nagelsmann gave a speech that was also widely praised because he called for a new way of working together and went beyond sport. Nevertheless, his statements remained vague and contradictory. Unlike his former mentor, the current coach of the Austrians Ralf Rangnick, Nagelsmann avoided mentioning the AfD and right-wing extremism by name. He probably didn’t want to further fuel political polarization – but football can’t fill that up anyway.
With Bernd M. Beyer, the author is writing a political history of the national team, which will be published by Edition Einwurf in 2025 will appear.
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