Football – Holy Ernst or the miraculous identification of football fans

There is nothing more deserted than the saying that football is a game in which 22 men argue about a ball instead of all buying one themselves. The moonlight sonata also consists only of grades. And against reading, it could lead to the field that a book only consists of the same 36 letters.

A life long

And yet the people removing football are right if they sometimes lovingly, sometimes seriously shock their heads over the Holy Ernst, negotiate their banalities with the football fans. For hours you can discuss controversial offside decisions, for weeks about a slamed game. And for a lifetime that their club with the red club colors is adorable, but with the Greens is a birth of hell. Childish, how did you want to discuss it?

Why are you actually a fan of a club? Success may have been the entry motif for many Bayern fans, as there are now twelve-year-olds all over Germany who run around in a leverkusen jersey after the championship title in 2024. But most football fans, if they are stadium goers, describe the first time in the stadium as an awakening experience – the mood, the energy. Who the game was against? One. Of course, because it would be different if they had clubs like Rot-Weiss, who have rarely got past the fourth league in the past decades, not over 10,000 spectators on average. RWE has a lot of tradition for this, also because Rahn really had to shoot from the background.

Academic discussions

So does the contrast between tradition and commerce as an explanatory approach for fan identification? The question can be negotiated rationally and (rightly) argue that not only RB Leipzig hangs on the drip of the industry, but the whole industry. But these are academic discussions. You can tell what the problem is really about the Red Bull branch when you look at the rather empty away curves at your games. Because people who only watch football on television live a completely different way of finding as a season ticket holder. It can be lived out on the home couch as well as on your cell phone on Portugal vacation. Or in the brand new RB jersey in front of the television when the team plays away.

But you can also go through the city with waking senses on the match day: Lens in northern France, where a scarf hangs out of every second window on working days, there is something completely different than Sinsheim, where you hardly notice on Saturdays that TSG Hoffenheim plays somewhere near the motorway. Incidentally, Lens has fewer residents than average to the games.

Strange longing

Gelsenkirchen, Hamburg, Dresden – impossible not to notice what is going on in a home game in the middle of the city. Schalke, HSV, Dynamo are – stupid word – “traditional associations”, those whose fan you become a four -year -old, because father and grandpa already found the stadium visit as natural as brushing your teeth. Such locations are not in a deep pores, not yet completely ironed by marketing people. You can still find the “dirt under the fingernail”, the rancid corner pub, which bursts at the seams on the match day.

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ID? Absolutely, but with the stadium experience, the many rituals, the buddies and buddies that you only meet on matchday. And, yes, there may also be this strange longing for the things that don’t change.

Only football officials think that what passionate stadium goers connects with their club has something to do with the young men who play there. Or with table positions. The latter is not unimportant, but if you want to really trouble as a manager, you will put a long -term season ticket holder in the summer break in a different place than in previous years.

Political commitment

Not to forget that identification can also arise from the fact that something that stands for a club is worth supporting. Tens of thousands of people in Germany are socio -political or socially committed in Germany. Take his club away from a St. Pauli fan-and he has to reinvent himself from scratch. As a political person. And in a double sense as a social being. Smart club tours leave fans and members air to breathe and space to get involved. Then you will notice how much strength volunteer work can develop if it is really intrinsically motivated.

And yet: Fan-Tum will ultimately always remain a mystery for people who have no access to this strange universe. Understanding football fans is unthinkable, without finding irrationality at least sympathetic, if not personality -forming. And irrationality can be that of likeable if the irrationals can also laugh at themselves.

And now a counter question: What do you give the executioner to a person for a birthday who only sees a ball and 22 people in a football game? Ideally nothing. It is good that football fans always plan something better when such people celebrate their birthday.