Motto for a long time, now the only rescue for FSV Zwickau
Photo: image/Kruczynski
It is very rare for a football club to organize a press conference with its fans. It’s no different at FSV Zwickau, where the relationship between officials and active supporters is remarkably good. But a few days ago, the time had come when CFO André Beuchold, together with two fans, including the lead singer of the Ultras, presented the campaign with which the third division relegated team wants to ensure its survival: 500,000 euros in donations are to be collected so that the club can at least continue playing in the fourth division. Otherwise, it is said, there is a risk of deletion from the register of associations. The response is amazing after less than two weeks: almost 200,000 euros have already been raised, and over 2,800 people have donated.
The strategy of the initiators has thus worked, to mobilize nationally and to take the financial misery as an opportunity to hold up a mirror to professional football with the motto “football belongs to the fans”, which goes beyond Saxony. “We don’t want to be punished for a shit system that prevails in the third division and in football in general,” says Matthias Bley from the active fan scene in the two-minute trailer. »The problem is the structures, the system. We fans are the solution, we’re not the problem.” It’s about “your support for honest, sustainable football without investors. In Zwickau and everywhere.« One hopes for a signal »that a football community based in solidarity is stronger than any investor.«
Background: Largely unnoticed by the national public, an investor also wanted to take over the fortunes of the association in Zwickau. But even after the first mutual scrutiny, it was clear that the investor camp would break style and culture, which would snub branch office employees and veteran players alike. The cancellation, that was evidently clear to everyone in the club, was unavoidable if you wanted to look each other in the eye in the future.
So the investor was gone again before he really got there. But there was also no plan to avert bankruptcy. So the club and fans got together and launched the crowdfunding campaign, which is also intended to draw attention to the structures of a business in whose top division almost every substitute player earns more than Zwickau needs to survive – at FC Bayern even a month. “The third league was and is not economically feasible for our club on our own,” it says in the call. »We tried honest work – but failed. Above all against financially strong competition, former Bundesliga clubs and clubs from economically and structurally strong regions. Even constant, humble squad planning was not enough to end up with little debt after seven years.«
It is a bitter but probably realistic conclusion that the organizers draw for their club, which is trying to keep its head above water in an underdeveloped region. And it does indeed point beyond Zwickau, after all three to five dozen traditional clubs and former first and second division clubs in the leagues are confronted with the fact that they can no longer promote themselves because the economic power in their region does not allow it. Many of them are then faced with the alternative of either handing themselves over to more or less dubious financiers or remaining permanently in the substructure. The best example is KFC Uerdingen, which the fan scene has now re-established in the fifth-rate Oberliga after various investors who promised promotion to the Bundesliga left behind a pile of fragments and debts.
The Saxons are spared such a fate – not least because it is part of the club culture that fans and club look for solutions together on essential issues. They have moved closer together since the bankruptcy in 2010, Lutz Teichmann, an active football fan, has been a member of the board for years, and Bley has also recently been a co-opted member of the supervisory board.
As with so many clubs, not everyone at the Zwickau office who liked to praise their own “traditional club” at promotional events realized that the 100-year history of the club should be researched and documented: the fans painstakingly built a “legend’s corner” at the stadium, where deserving players and coaches of the past decades are honored. A clubhouse with a small museum and bar was also built on their own in the center of Zwickau, where until then, apart from graffiti and stickers, not much had pointed to the sporting flagship of the 90,000-inhabitant city.
Moving closer together has only positive consequences for club life: Even after the relegation in May, players and fans parted peacefully. There were no insults to the players, which are otherwise almost part of everyday life. There are not many clubs that would have been relegated without their own doing. But the West Saxons cannot be accused of serious management errors in their seven-year history in the third division. Expensive stars were not committed, the salaries were appropriate for the league. Trainer Joe Enochs was also held on for a long time, which is unusual for the industry. The fact that he was fired shortly before the end of the season may have been an act of desperation. But after Enoch’s five-year tenure, those responsible in Zwickau do not have to blame themselves for having prematurely pulled the ripcord.
Consequently, in the future it will be about consolidation and something that is (even) more important to many fans than table places and league membership: the feeling that their club is still their club: FSV has already sold more than 1000 season tickets for the coming season, in the coming days other celebrities, bands and clubs are to be presented who support »football belongs to the fans«. The start is made – how could it be otherwise – by the Dynamo Dresden club, whose ultra scene has been friends with the Zwickauer for over 20 years. It didn’t take long to find the motto for the benefit game this Saturday: »Eene Bande«.
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