Olé olé: The teams march into the Rathenower Stadium, which bears the beautiful name Vogelgesang
Photo: imago/Sebastian Wells
Metropolis arrogance always works. And she can be really funny at times. For example, when fans of North German clubs sing “cows, pigs, southern clubs” when they have to play in Großaspach or Pipinsried. Or when – as happened the weekend before last – fans of Energie Cottbus mock the really vanishingly small opposing fan curve during the away game in Meuselwitz: “Without Meusel you’re just a joke.” However, the mockers are often the same fans who emphasize in retrospect that it these trips to the provinces are the most fun. To Meuselwitz, the little town between Zeitz and Altenburg, where the Soljanka costs three euros. After Rathenow, where they have had the same head coach since 1989. Or to the longstanding regional league club Neuruppin, where you can splash about in the nearby lake before the game. The premier league, on the other hand: One stadium looks like the other. And it’s not just the splashing that the police object to.
However, this season the rural idylls in the Regionalliga Nordost, which covers the area of the former GDR, are not far away. Only six clubs come from the provinces, but 14 come from large cities or their periphery. And already, four games before the end, it is clear that the league map will be even more monotonous in the coming season. Two of the alleged three relegated will probably come from the country. As of now, that would be Rathenow and Auerbach, who will meet directly this Saturday (1 p.m.) in the Vogelgesang Stadium in Rathenow. If the current table-16. the third league, Viktoria Berlin, would have to be relegated to another regional league down to the premier league. And that would come, as of now, from the east of Brandenburg: Fürstenwalde.
Bad times for the football province, even though clubs like Auerbach or Rathenow have been doing business on a solid basis for decades. In the past ten years, the Vogtlanders have consistently played in the fourth division, Rathenow in seven out of ten years. If both are now threatened with the fifth division, it has little to do with their own mistakes. But a lot with the fact that in football there is a redistribution from bottom to top, which is also noticeable in the regional league as the privileges of the metropolises over the supposed football province.
Paradigm shift in the associations?
The DFB Vice President Rainer Koch, who was voted out in March and who was the decisive man for the third and fourth leagues for decades, had issued the motto that the regional leagues should reflect the regions. The fourth-highest division is intended for solidly operating clubs from all parts of the country and should not become a catchment area for stranded traditional clubs that, out of sheer self-interest, are demanding the leagues be downsized.
Even the biggest critics of cooking – and after his resignation there are even more than before – credit the failed multi-functionary with the fact that, unlike other forces in the DFB, he at least tried to stand up for the footballing middle class from the use provinces. And indeed, it would be the most fundamental task of the world’s largest football association to advocate for the interests of clubs below the second division down to the C class.
But he doesn’t do exactly that, club representatives from all five regional leagues complain. On the contrary. The preference for the big ones starts with the talent scouting, where the scouts of the state national teams too seldom looked around outside of the big clubs with their youth academies. The fact that two of the four promoted players from last season were secondary representatives of professional clubs (Dortmund, Freiburg) contradicts the basic idea of a regional league. In addition, there are double standards when it comes to infrastructure requirements. While the secondary representation uses the infrastructure of the Bundesliga clubs and the big cities turn a blind eye, the provincial clubs are hit hard.
The urban-rural conflict in the north-east, which attracts a comparatively large number of spectators due to its many traditional clubs, is already very pronounced. Clubs such as Energie Cottbus, BFC Dynamo Berlin, Lok Leipzig, Chemnitzer FC or FC Carl Zeiss Jena, which belonged to the Oberliga inventory in GDR times and still have professional-compatible fans and a lavish infrastructure, meet clubs here such as ZFC Meuselwitz, Union Fürstenwalde, FSV Luckenwalde, Optik Rathenow or VfB Auerbach. In other words, clubs where car dealerships and Edeka stores are among the more important sponsors, where viewer income plays a decisive role and where any expenditure that is requested from outside has to be deducted from investments in the team. The latter applies to all league competitors, but hits those clubs particularly hard (like Auerbach) who have the coach as the only full-time employee in their budget.
It is precisely these clubs that suffer from the seemingly absurd rule and safety mania of the associations, which also demand that village clubs meticulously implement the license requirements. There is nothing that is not mandatory: from the condition of the toilets to the minimum number of covered seats to the size of a separately accessible guest block. Since the Baden village club SV Spielberg was relegated to the Regionalliga Südwest in 2016 after a year, it has no longer used the then newly built guest block. The fact that he had to build it at the time consumed almost a third of the total budget of around 150,000 euros. Not an isolated case: “We have had to keep expanding our stadium for years,” agrees Volkmar Kramer, Managing Director of VfB Auerbach. »In the premier league, floodlights were needed so that we could also play in the evenings. When we then climbed further, we had to invest again because their LUX number was not sufficient.«
Location disadvantage province
Year after year, they continued to expand the Arena zur Vogtlandweide – that’s the name of the VfB stadium. Well, in April 2022, they have a really nice stadium, but are wondering whether they would have been relegated to the fifth division if they had put the money into the team instead of the construction work required by the Northeast German Football Association? “The regional league must be economically and sportingly feasible,” Kramer sighs. “And getting it right again year after year is extremely difficult for clubs like us and Rathenow.”
The fact that both clubs are in a relegation zone and that there are almost exclusively clubs in the last third of the table that are not at home in the metropolises is no coincidence, says Kramer, who of course “does not want to assume” “that this is how it is wanted”. The fact that the Berlin clubs did not have to invest in their venues, but could instead use the existing stadiums in the metropolis (Altglienicke plays in the Hertha amateur stadium, Tasmania in Lichterfelde), is something they in Halberstadt, Auerbach or Luckenwalde are not without bitterness. Especially since the public interest in clubs like Altglienicke, the Berliner AK, the Hertha secondary representation or Tasmania is so limited that, minus the guest fans, sometimes only 80 to 150 diehards pay admission.
However, the delusion raging among entrepreneurs who are usually quite remote from football and have too much money that they can carve the “number three behind Hertha and Union” out of nothing with a lot of money is likely to wash many a wallflower from Berlin into the regional league in the coming years.
Meanwhile, the regions that Rainer Koch once declared the natural home of the regional league are hardly ever shown. Especially not in the northeast, where traditional football areas like Upper Lusatia are already missing. Their representatives, for example Bischofswerdaer FV, Budissa Bautzen or FC Oberlausitz Neugersdorf, were not long ago part of the inventory of the Regionalliga Nordost and carried out local derbies there in front of four-digit spectators. They’re all down a notch now. In the Regionalliga Nordost there are of course still a lot of local derbies. 163 people wanted to see the Berlin meeting between Altglienicke and Lichtenberg last weekend.
