Football club as a place of learning – The B3 practices tolerance

Actually, the B3 youth team of JFV Neuseenland should have trained on the field in the drizzle this Wednesday evening. But this time the teenagers’ training session will be held in the attic of the historic club building on the grounds of the Süd-kampfbahn. Instead of cones and goals, the organizers from IVF Leipzig set up a circle of chairs, a flipchart board, a screen and a projector. “Discrimination in Football” is the title of the workshop – a special unit on tolerance, diversity and democracy for 15 and 16 year olds from the JFV, which is an association of clubs from the south of Leipzig and the neighboring Markkleeberg.

IVF is the abbreviation for initiative for more social responsibility in grassroots football, as workshop leader Dennis Schmitt explains to the young participants. The non-profit organization was recently awarded the renowned Julius Hirsch Prize by the German Football Association (DFB) because it has been carrying out important educational work in Saxon youth football on its own initiative for 15 years. As one of the few projects in Saxony, IVF does not raise awareness among multipliers, but rather works directly with young people. In the football context, no one else in the Free State does that.

JFV trainer Marcel Leß got Cola, Fanta and Sprite; the players arrive one by one. Leß is happy to make his unit available for the two hours of anti-discrimination training. “The boys sometimes don’t know what’s offensive and what’s just said because they don’t have the feeling for it yet,” says the coach. Opponents, for example, would be named in the game based on their skin color. “I always say: The player also has a shirt number that you can use to identify him,” reports Heß. This is not intentional discrimination, but rather happens “unconsciously.”

Insulting referees is also an issue and also occurs in youth games. “Sometimes stupid comments or insults are made against the referee,” observes the young coach.

The JFV Neuseenland is one of seven clubs that take part in the IVF program “A club for everyone”, in which teams from C to A youth are continuously supported with educational offers and club managers are also trained in diverse club culture. »This philosophy is important for the JFV Neuseenland; At other clubs where I trained, that wasn’t an issue at all,” says Leß. “I think it makes sense for these discussions to be put more on the agenda everywhere.”

He himself would have been interested in the workshop, but is not allowed to take part because players can sometimes communicate better without a coach and can speak more freely without an authority figure in the room. Quite understandable, but more workshops like this would also make sense for coaches, referees and other volunteers.

Last season, according to the DFB, 909 football games in Germany had to be canceled due to violence or discrimination. Around 1.5 million games are played annually under the association’s umbrella; incidents of violence were recorded in the match reports in almost 4,000 games and discrimination in 2,520 games. The number of unreported incidents is likely to be much higher. As the Saxon Football Association (SFV) announced, there were 71 cases of discrimination at games in Saxony in 2023/24 – more than in the past ten years; 13 games had to be canceled due to violence and/or discrimination. However, violent incidents decreased massively compared to the previous season.

In order to benefit from the know-how of IVF, the SFV will now also cooperate with IVF for the first time from 2025, as an association spokesman announced in response to an nd request. It is about the “expansion of networks, exchange of information, knowledge transfer, quality assurance and the integration of suitable IVF workshops into the SFV offerings”.

Since 2020, the Saxon association has had one person working full-time as a consultant for anti-discrimination and violence prevention. Far too little with around 900 clubs and around 60,000 games per year. “Here we would like to see significantly more government/political support in terms of personnel and financing, because promoting democracy, diversity and tolerance is not just the task of a specialist association,” said the SFV.

But back to the B3 youth workshop. For some people, the desire to spend two hours on anti-discrimination after a long day at school is initially manageable. The team’s vice-captain says he has already attended two events of this kind, which is why he would have preferred to play football. But the players all recognize that there is a need to address exclusion. One reported an incident in the D youth team when a player from the club insulted an opponent after a foul because of his weight and was therefore sent off the pitch with a red card and banned for several games. Coach Leß had also previously reported on this event: “The red card is also a form of learning, but I would have preferred if he hadn’t said that, then he wouldn’t have offended anyone and wouldn’t have missed four or five games if he had “I would have been taught that before.”

After the introduction round, the IVF workshop leaders draw the teenagers into the topic with a detailed quiz. Different types of discrimination are categorized using images, videos and descriptions. In one question, the well-known anti-Semitic banner of Energie Cottbus fans can be seen, who call Dynamo Dresden supporters Jews and thus want to insult them. After each answer there is a brief discussion about the motives of this discrimination. The young footballers are open-minded, motivated to take part and are quite knowledgeable about the topic. One of the group knows what discrimination against people with disabilities is called: ableism.

In between, there are always discussion questions in which the participants think about, for example, why it makes more sense to talk about a team instead of a team, especially in women’s football. Language can also create barriers. One participant is not yet sufficiently fluent in German to be able to follow the workshop; A fellow player sits down next to him and simultaneously translates into English, so to speak. That is also team spirit.

In addition to general awareness-raising and an introduction to the topic, participants will also receive very specific recommendations for action in the second part of the evening: How should you behave if someone is discriminated against on the pitch? A video scene from 2013 is shown in which Kevin Prince Boateng and his teammates from AC Milan left the pitch as a unit after racist insults. Political scientist Dennis Schmitt, one of three full-time IVF employees, sees this as one of the key moments of the workshop. »This is where the young people within the team often discuss things in detail for the first time: How would we actually do that? What options do we have? What do the people affected need?”

The past few weeks have been turbulent for Schmitt and his colleagues. On the one hand, the awarding of the Julius Hirsch Prize attracted a lot of attention and recognition, but on the other hand, the project’s existence was threatened. Due to the ongoing coalition talks and the unclear political situation in Saxony, the Saxon Development Bank will only decide on funding new projects from the “Cosmopolitan Saxony” program from mid-2025, through which the IVF has so far primarily financed itself.

Since the funding only lasts a maximum of three years, existing initiatives must always reapply after the funding has expired. It was now said that there would be no funding retroactively and that, after approval, projects could only begin work in autumn 2025. When asked, the Saxon Ministry of Social Affairs announced that 56 new applications had been received, none of which will initially receive any funding. Only the 59 projects that had already been approved will continue to be financed with a total of 6.3 million euros.

For IVF, that would have meant that out of four full-time positions, at most one could have continued to be financed – from reserves. But due to a lucky coincidence, the Leipzig-based company was recognized last Monday as a lighthouse project among more than 200 applicants at an awards ceremony organized by the fund company Union Investment and received 30,000 euros for it. Enough to be able to continue the important work on the football base for now.

However, in order to expand the programs and reach more clubs, significantly more resources and support would be needed. How important tolerance training and sensitization are, especially in club sports, is evident everywhere. When players from another team leave the clubhouse of the Süd-kampfbahn, these teenagers loudly tease each other: “Fuck off here, you have no business here!” There is a fine line between stupid sayings and, especially in the closed space of the sports club environment Discrimination.