THEY used to pour off the boats into the city of Rostock every other weekend; Swedes mainly, but Danes and Finns too. It became a popular pilgrimage, the bizarrest lost weekend of choice for Scandinavians. If Hansa Rostock were at home, they would come.
Rostock is a small city on Germany’s east Baltic coast with no obvious attractions bar the fading industry of its shipyards and, until recently, a unique football team. Unique because, while other clubs from the old East Germany struggled, Hansa hung on, the last East German club clinging tenaciously to the top flight of the Bundesliga. And unique because of this travelling support.
When Hansa realised that Swedish fans would travel to watch their Swedish players, they worked on the formula and milked it. Last season they had on their books five Swedes, two Danes and Jari Litmanen to ignite the Finnish interest. Some 20,000 in all came off the boats last season, many of them regularly — and how Hansa needed them.
Rostock, you see, is a town on the wrong side of the old Iron Curtain. Like many others, it has suffered a westward migration of the bulk of its population, particularly its youth. And even so, unemployment levels in certain areas are creeping up towards 30 per cent. It does not help that shipping to Germany tends now to avoid its old shipyards and head for the alternatives farther west. So even with tickets as cheap as €5 (about £3.50), Hansa’s 30,000-seat Ostseestadion last season tended to be only two-thirds full.
Hansa has now become a typical club on the wrong side of the old Iron Curtain, too. Relegated on the final day of last season, it has left the Bundesliga’s first division without any eastern representation. In 1991, for the first full domestic season after unification, Hansa and Dynamo Dresden were launched into the top flight and six others into the second division. There are now none in that first division and only four in the second. Football has thus become a metaphor for the failure of the united Germany: east cannot match west economically and its football clubs cannot match up either.
With a general election on Sunday, the irony is that Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had hoped to use football to his benefit. He is by no means the first politician to claim allegiance to a football club, though probably the first in claiming allegiance to three (Borussia Dortmund, popular to the working classes, Hanover 96, his home-town club, and FC Cottbus, his token eastern club).
His original intention, however, had been to call the election in September next year, when he hoped Germany would re-elect him on the feel-good highs of a successful hosting of the World Cup. But forced to bring the election forward, football is no help to him whatsoever. Neo-Nazism is rife among the football hooligan element and the game in east Germany is crumbling.
Unification has failed sport in the east — and football in particular — because sport in the east is no longer a tool for flag-waving the successes of eastern bloc politics. The only time that East Germany played West was in the 1974 World Cup and East won 1-0; the fact that Jürgen Sparwasser, who scored the goal, later defected west was but a minor detail in the propaganda that would follow.
Unlike in athletics and swimming, though, steroids and military training regimes could not ensure regular success in football, not that there was any shortage of effort. The best football club in the old GDR was Dynamo Berlin, the plaything of the Stasi, who would force the best GDR footballers to play for it. The club was popularly known as the “11 Schweine”: they failed to win friends but collected East German titles instead. Between 1979 and 1988, they won ten of them in a row.
But in a unified Germany, where economics governs professional sport, Dynamo fell like a stone and dropped out of the professional game. They are now in the Bundesliga’s fourth division. And Hansa Rostock, the east’s stand-out success? The relegated club cannot afford transfer fees so it can no longer afford to buy Scandinavians.
With local industry barely existent, sponsors are barely existent, too. The TV budget has, meanwhile, been slashed by 60 per cent. Is there a way back? Four defeats from four matches this season may provide the answer. With Hansa, you feel a sense of a downward spiral. “A lot of people have no jobs here, so football becomes more important,” Frank Pagelsdorf, the coach, said. “Football gives them something to feel proud of. That’s why we so badly need just one or two teams from the east to stay in the first division.”
If Rostock have a hope, it is through their youth. Create players to sell — in other words, buy into first-world economics. They already have a good record here: in 1999, five of their youngsters went west, Carsten Jancker among them. And their under-16s, who recently beat Liverpool and Real Madrid in a tournament in Italy, have among them a lad, Toni Kloos, who has been turning heads at Chelsea.
The irony here is that, in the unified Germany, the east has decided to revert to old ways. The production line in the GDR was so good that after unification, some 500 players joined western clubs; by the mid-1990s, they had formed the backbone of the national team. The fact that the national team now includes only two regulars — Michael Ballack and Bernd Schneider — demonstrates how completely the old GDR education system, which won such disapproval in the West, was allowed to decay.
So three years ago, the governing body of football in the north east — effectively the old East Germany — elected to revamp it. Not all of it, but sports schools, where talented youngsters would train twice a day, two hours at a time, have been brought back. “We knew the old system very well,” Manfred Wimmer, the Rostock chairman, said, “and we’re convinced it is the right one.”
And so eastern Germany intends to be a production line again. Politics may have let it down, but with the old regime, it may be able to do business again.
GOAL WITH POLITICAL UNDERTONES
JÜRGEN SPARWASSER, the goalscorer in East Germany’s 1-0 win over West Germany in 1974, is now 57, living outside Frankfurt and setting up a football school in Pottsdam. He retired from football in 1979 and went into the GDR system as a coach of PE teachers.
In 1988, he defected to West Germany. His wife had been given leave to visit her family, he was away on sports duty at the same time and so they plotted their escape. Thereafter, he became youth team coach at Eintracht Frankfurt. In 1993, he started working for the German PFA.
“I am still proud of that goal in 1974,” he said. “That World Cup was the high point of my career. No one believed we could beat the West German team. It was a big political thing. I am still sometimes celebrated as a hero for that goal, especially by nostalgic East German people
