Has thought it through carefully: DFB: A cornucopia for the officials”>Bernd Neuendorf wants to become President of the German Football Association.
Photo: dpa/Marius Becker
Calculation is probably not behind the fact that Bernd Neuendorf made a name for himself as a friend of the now rather glorified football of the past. While Peter Peters, his only opponent in the election for the next president of the German Football Association (DFB) scheduled for March 11, is closely linked to the commercialization of the sport through his work in the DFL league association and at Schalke 04, Neuendorf is happy to report of experiences from the last century. In his office in Hennef, in the headquarters of the Middle Rhine Football Association, of which he is president, there is a huge black-and-white picture of the old Tivoli in Aachen – he says that’s where his love for stadium football once ignited. While at Oxford he was an active rower like most students there, but at weekends he frequented the venerable Manor Ground. Oxford United had been promoted to the top flight in 1985 and Neuendorf used games against the island’s biggest clubs as an occasional escape from elite university circles.
“But I wouldn’t describe myself as a football romantic,” Neuendorf clarifies. Rather, he wants to create connections between the traditional and the modern, between the grassroots and the elite, between professionals and amateurs, between factions that have been at odds for years. With a “cultural change”, he will settle the many conflicts surrounding the DFB and end the old power games in order to “put football back into focus”, he announces and says: “My candidacy is an offer for an approach , as I imagine it: that you guide the bandage more calmly and don’t jump over every little stick.«
Perhaps this level-headed man is actually the right candidate for this project, which his predecessors failed miserably. However, it is not so easy to grab this little-known human who is well versed in the engine rooms of power.
In any case, the 61-year-old Rhinelander looks very calm. He thinks carefully before answering, is curious and wants to talk, for example, about how the DFB should deal with all the abysses of the upcoming World Cup in Qatar. The SPD politician Christian Obrok, a long-time companion, characterizes Neuendorf as a “clever thinker” and “highly integrative character who thinks and acts very strategically, very politically”.
Born in Düren, the functionary studied political science and sociology in Bonn and Oxford, completed a traineeship at the Reuters agency and worked for the parliamentary editors of various daily newspapers. Under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, he became SPD spokesman in Berlin in 2003 and had to sell the controversial agenda reforms at the turn of the millennium, which divided the party for years. “I was already convinced of Gerd Schröder’s course,” he says. “Back then, we were the group that said: We think that’s the right thing to do.”
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He was also connected to Olaf Scholz at the time; the current Federal Chancellor was the Secretary General of the party at the time. “It used to be a matter of course that DFB presidents had access to Berlin – I think that got lost a bit,” says Neuendorf, suggesting that football could benefit from its connections to the Chancellery.
In 2004 he returned to North Rhine-Westphalia and became a confidant of the later Prime Minister Hannelore Kraft. He first worked as spokesman for the state SPD, then from 2007 as state manager and from 2013 to 2017 as state secretary in the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport. Neuendorf loves the opera and the theater and today, as the head of the Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation, cultivates the intellectual legacy of the great SPD politician. In the environment of the Düsseldorf state parliament, it is said that Neuendorf had meanwhile been the “organizational and intellectual backbone” of the state SPD.
So far, however, he has not found a really coherent way of dealing with the question of this election, which is decisive for many observers: How much power will the controversial string puller Reiner Koch have under the new president? The two former DFB presidents Reinhard Grindel and Fritz Keller describe Koch as the main person responsible for the shattered state of the association. According to Keller, this is a man who “lacks any moral compass, who has been scheming for years, putting massive pressure on people inside and outside the DFB with his cliques”.
Peter Peters distances himself from Koch. Neuendorf, who is the favorite candidate for the amateurs, also promises not to give him any posts in his immediate vicinity. At the same time, however, he says that he first has to “get his own picture, free of all the jingling around it.” He knows the bad image, “but as a person I can’t just side with the opponents of Koch without really knowing why.” For many of the delegates from the DFL and the state associations who are entitled to vote, this is Neuendorf’s greatest weakness.
