The public prosecutor’s office should consider setting up an external office with the German Football Association. On Thursday she was a guest there again – and the days before she inaugurated the newly moved headquarters in the new DFB campus with a search. Appropriately, one can meanwhile get tangled up in the tangle of procedures surrounding this association of comrades, which seems to be getting closer with every scandal. Even when the investigators were stacking boxes on Thursday, the inclined Presidium listened to the old victim rhetoric of Rainer Koch and Co.
There remains – also in view of the underground image values of the scandalous association, which in a World Cup year could perhaps startle the sponsors – only one reasonable, decent conclusion: The Koch system, a network of power around the eternal vice president that has grown over many years, must away. If that doesn’t happen at the latest at the DFB Bundestag next Friday, the association’s leaders shouldn’t even dare to use the term “new beginning”.
It is clear that Koch sees things differently, the man who is omnipresent and at the same time without a trace. He will continue to knit his tale of sacrifice to the end. The question is when his colleagues will wake up. So when people who sometimes collect thousands of euros a month and pretend to speak for tens of thousands of volunteers at the football base finally take note that their longtime amateur boss also plays a central role in this new judicial affair. He initiated the shady contract with the consultant Kurt Diekmann together with his DFB internal combatants, he even attributed this cooperation to a spectacular 18 million euro economic success for the DFB. Public, in spring 2021 in the ZDF sports studio. How did he come up with this abstruse number, was there any success at all?
Any expansion, any expansion of this new infidelity investigation now falls back on those caught up in the mesh of the great networker. Or does anyone believe that all of these events involving top DFB representatives are misunderstandings that will disappear into thin air; evil conspiracies? What about the alarming findings of internal and external auditors? What about the devastating judgments that four ex-presidents pass on their colleague Koch?
Two candidates will be up for election next Friday at the DFB Bundestag. The favorite, Bernd Neuendorf, was previously considered a supporter of Koch. The former SPD politician also publicly considered the suspicion against his party member to be too thin. If he continues to do so, he disqualifies himself for an office that, according to the most recent survey of almost 12,000 participants by Ansbach University, only eleven percent of those interested in football trust him.
The DFB has fierce infidelity investigations in the house. That he believed for the umpteenth time the explanations of those who – one way or another – are responsible borders on organ failure. A news DFB has to start now, not just at the Bundestag. Candidate Peters has based his program on the fact that Koch should under no circumstances be given an office. If Neuendorf sticks to his protective stance for the multi-functionary, the electorate in the DFB and also in the DFL league can be classified as sectarian. Then the abbreviation DFB stands for: German Football Brotherhood.
