In the World Cup preliminary round, more than half of the seats remained empty for around half of the matches. Tickets are now also available for some of the matches in the round of the best eight. This is partly due to the weather, but not only that.
A year later, Rudi Carrell would land a hit with “Wann wird’s mal wieder richtig Sommer” (Want it to be summer again) – the lyrics were probably inspired by the wet summer of 1974 during the World Cup. The tickets, available from ten marks, were only half a box office hit, similar to the record “Fußball ist unser Leben” (Football is our life) sung by the national team with the never-before-seen opening line “Ha! Ho! Heja, heja, he!”
Because he came up with a more understandable text between the studio visit and the start of the tournament, one of the singers, Erwin Kremers, missed the World Cup. Five minutes before the end of the last league game, he called the referee a “stupid pig”, which he repeated twice when asked by the referee. Coach Helmut Schön did not use him. He wanted players who “know how to behave”.
“Diplomatic feat”
While fans from eight of Germany’s nine neighbouring countries (all except Luxembourg) will support their team at the 2024 European Championship, in 1974 only the Dutch will be there – apart from the “neighbour” GDR, which will only allow around 5,000 “tourists” selected by the Stasi according to “firm class standpoint” into the West.
The fact that a quarter of the participants – the GDR, Poland, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia – come from the Eastern Bloc, which does not offer freedom of travel, is also negative for ticket sales.
The President of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito (second from left), and his wife Jovanka Broz visiting the 1974 World Cup in Düsseldorf.Picture Alliance
Because half a million guest workers from Yugoslavia live in the Federal Republic, their team’s games are usually well attended. Then the 82-year-old head of state Tito arrives and wants to show that he is a football fan.
However, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution considers Tito’s state visit to be the number one security risk and provides the police with a list of 600 Yugoslav exiles who are seen as possible assassins. When Tito made a surprise visit to Bonn in 1970, the police reacted quickly to this danger, as the “Spiegel” reported: “Out of fear of Croatian assassins, President Tito and Chancellor Brandt, Mrs. Rut in a Cossack look, hid behind the walls of the 4711 castle Röttgen near Cologne, eating Rhenish potato pancakes and chilled Steinhäger.”
When Tito expressed his wish to see Germany play against Yugoslavia, “all the alarm bells rang,” as Dieter Bierbaum, head of the Düsseldorf organizing committee at the time, recalled in 2006. “It took a diplomatic effort to talk him out of it.” It worked. Tito watched the game from a secret location.
