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NO DICE Berlin football in words, photos and illustrations If we’re perfectly honest, No Dice Edition 1 was something of a shot in the dark, our little experiment thrown together on freezing terraces, in muddy fields and in darkened rooms fueled by copious amounts of caffeine and grainy YouTube videos. While we loved our ugly little duckling, we had no preconceptions whatsoever as to whether others would. But our limited edition print copies sold out quickly, and the PDFs are still being downloaded from our site. The confirmation that this was, in fact, a good idea, had come loud and clear. And for that we are eternally grateful. It helped us to fling ourselves into the difficult second edition with even more enthusiasm, and we are very excited about the end result. While a perusal of the two features may suggest some sort of themed edition, that is not the case. Jacob and I are simply writing about what motivates us. For me, that began with a desire to know more about the history of Türkiyemspor, and, following on from that, a desire to understand how a club with such enormous significance in the Kreuzberg community could peter out so pitiably and so unnoticed by the larger football community.
Cover illustration by Emily Sweetman submissions & advertising info@nodicemagazine.com All text & images property of NoDice
Jacob, while perusing endless pages of football facts, came across a startling one - before Viv Anderson for England, before Chris Hughton for Ireland, came Erwin Kostedde for Germany. Anderson and Hughton became heralds of a new age of acceptance in their respective homelands, but Kostedde? He faded largely into obscurity, crushed by the constant weight of being an unwilling pioneer and battling against those who objected to the colour of his skin. Jacob traces Kostedde’s route into the Nationalmannschaft, with particular focus on his time in Berlin with Hertha in the turbulent and fascinating 1975/76 season. We’ve enjoyed making No Dice Edition Two even more than the first one. We hope you enjoy reading it. And if you do, help us out with Edition Three (for which the ideas arealready flowing) - let your friends know. Tweet about us. Share us on Facebook. And,most importantly, tell the guy shivering beside you on the terrace next Saturday afternoon. We’re all in this together.
Stephen Glennon March 2012
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NO DICE CONTENTS
p7. Erwin Kostedde and Hertha BSC by Jacob Sweetman p15. 1.FC Union v Dynamo Dresden No Dice match report p23. T端rkiyemspor: The Rise and Fall by Stephen Glennon p32. Goalkeepers: A photo essay by Ian Stenhouse 3
No Dice are: Stephen Glennon (Ireland) Words & Punctuation Jake Sweetman (England) Just Words Jude Flegel (Germany) Webmistress & Digital Design Emily Sweetman (England) Illustrations Ian Stenhouse (Scotland) Pictures
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ERWIN KOSTEDDE and HERTHA BSC The story of an extraordinary mundane campaign. by Jacob Sweetman If people talk today about the 1974/75 Bundesliga, it is usually with a hushed reverenceabout the champions, Borussia Mönchengladbach. The season had bled through into thesummer like a cheaply dyed replica shirt due to Germany’s winning of the World Cup,but there was someone else who had been knocking on the door of history that season. He did so with a persistence that echoed his effervescence off the pitch, and his relentless drive on it. Erwin Kostedde had finished behind the likes of Jupp Heynckes, Gerd Müller and Allan Simonsen to come fifth in the top scorers list as his Kickers Offenbach side finished four points and two places above Bayern in the table that year. Four points, a couple of places and every one of Kostedde’s 18 goals had made the difference against their supposed betters. Bayern may have retained their European Cup in a bad tempered final against Leeds United, but they had been humiliated twice by Offenbach. Kostedde, a likeable, funny bloke, who some said talked far too much and had a bit of a reputation for enjoying himself, had even broken through into the national team and was making noises about taking Gerd Müller’s famous number 9 shirt for good in the wake of the great striker’s international retirement. Erwin Kostedde was different. Not because of the assured way that he carried himself. Nor because of his goalscoring records, which, although were very good, weren’t spectacular for a 28 year old who wanted to fill the biggest boots in the business. It was because Erwin Kostedde was black. Every time he played it was against more than just eleven opponents. He was taking on, or so it seemed to him, the whole country. The one that he had been so proud to represent. When those misty eyed memories are cast back onto that season, if they weren’t focussed on ‘Gladbach or on Kostedde, there was another miraculous story to ponder upon. They would likely be focussed onto Hertha BSC. In Georg Kessler’s first season in charge in Berlin, the former Dutch national coach had led them to the very apex of the league. Their second place finish that year, secured with a 4-2 win over Bochum, was, and remains to this day, their highest ever finish in the comparatively short history of the Bundesliga. They had had the second highest average home attendance (over 36,000), after a Schalke side that they already despised, and had the makings of a club on the up.
Erwin Kostedde by Emily Sweetman
The city, or at least the half of it that was allowed to follow the games (or the half of that that wasn’t following TeBe’s attempts at an automatic re-promotion to the top table), would, very soon, be talking of the attack on the summit that they would be mounting in the next year. There were a lot of people on the other side of the wall too who would be watching. One can’t block TV broadcasts with a wall.
You can only block the physical things. For many people in these parts of Berlin to cheer for Hertha was to cheer against the DDR. Georg Kessler’s success was theirs. The last day of that season was also tinged with some sadness for Hertha amongst the rejoicing - a hero was taking his final bow, in the remarkably slight figure of Ludwig “Luggi” Müller. He was the bedrock to which the side had been anchored for the last couple of years, a centre half who had done as much as anyone that season to keep Hertha’s astonishing home record intact. Kessler knew (and the city hoped) that he would have to be as canny in the transfer market as he was on the training pitch if he was to live up to Luggi’s closing words as he took his leave – “I wish Hertha BSC the fulfilment of their greatest dream next season. To win the Bundesliga title.” Kessler was a bit more circumspect about his ambitions. “This [75/76] will be the strongest Bundesliga season in years. Whoever finishes in the top eight would surely finish in the top three in any other European league.... We will try to come in amongst the top five,” he told the Berliner Morgenpost at the start of July that year, but even the boss’s guarded optimism was misplaced. This is not the story of a particularly successful season for Hertha BSC, but neither was 1975/76 a spectacular failure, even if the fans (as fans throughout the footballing universe often do) in places saw it as the end of the world, and attendances crashed from their peak the year before. It is also not the story of how Erwin Kostedde would become the most beloved player in the land. It is, however, an interesting time capsule and an, at times melancholic, reminder of a team that lost its way and a player who would somehow always struggle to fit in. This is the extraordinary yet mundane story of Germany’s first black international, and his year with a club who had punched above their weight despite being based in a walledin island in the foreign land next door – Erwin Kostedde and Hertha BSC. ------------------------------------------------------------Germany didn’t have an African or Caribbean colonial past like its equally voracious European neighbours. The consequence being that its black population was much smaller than that of, say, Britain or Portugal. Erwin Kostedde was similar to many blacks that were born there, the sons of American GI’s stationed during and after the war. Especially in Germany (there were only two other black kids around when Kostedde was growing up, and tragically they would both die young, haunting Kostedde for years to come) this was a tough introduction to life. They stood out.
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Erwin Kostedde Kostedde was born in stuffy, and staunchly Catholic Münster, and as he would tell journalist Ralf Piorr for 11Freunde years later, “I sometimes noticed that parents didn’t like it if I played with the other kids... It was bad enough to wander around on a Sunday wearing jeans, but day in, day out, I wore the wrong skin colour.” He was putting it mildly. Piorr later told me “His whole life was characterised by racism... Münster was more up tight than the English upper class at Ascot.” As is so often the case, he sought acceptance, or at least a semblance of belonging, by playing football. And he was good – much better than the other kids. Good enough to blaze a trail. Good enough to play for his country – and it is worth reiterating that, good times and bad, he always knew that it was HIS country – some three years before Viv Anderson would do the same for England. He wanted to be Pelé, but, instructively, he also wanted to be Uwe Seeler, that most beloved of German strikers who had the name “Uns Uwe” bestowed upon him. Our Uwe. As the top scorer in the Belgian top division with Standard Liege, Erwin Kostedde had come on in leaps and bounds. Playing with internationals had helped to instill a discipline that he was lacking, and honed a technique that was still rough around the edges. He liked the ball at his feet, was deadly in the air and he knew when to give and when to go, but he was still unrefined. He wasn’t like Gerd Müller, a man who dropped out of his mother’s belly into a gap in the six yard box as the ball was just due to arrive at his feet, but his explosive burst of pace was visible, and he was quickly becoming a star as he poked the ball past Antonio Betancourt to score the only goal in Liege’s European cup victory against Real Madrid in 1969. Kostedde came back home to Germany when he joined Kickers Offenbach in 1971. Alongside the wonderful Siggi Held he would become a hero there, remaining their all time highest goalscorer (and even had the honour of having a fanzine ‘Erwin’ named after him - a true mark of respect). He could have made his ground breaking international debut earlier than he did. As he told kicker in 1974, “Sure, I’ve played well. After Müller’s retirement there is an incentive to. His post must be fought for, and I will be right in there, fighting. Why shouldn’t Kostedde... have a chance?” He name checked himself in the first person, as gifted sportsmen are wont to do. But this was in the wake of his broken arm, sustained as he crashed into the post after heading in the fifth goal of a remarkable 6-0 decimation of Bayern (that no superlative could do justice to) in the first game of that post World Cup season. It meant he would have to wait until December for his debut in the German white shirt away to Malta. They squeaked through that match, 1- 0. In a side struggling to raise the bar further from the heights of the World Cup win, and in the grip of an existential crisis as the successors to Germany’s greatest ever sides, he barely made an impact. Erwin Kostedde would only get two more chances to play
for his country, in an equally disappointing 1-1 in Greece, and in a high profile friendly, at the self-proclaimed home of football, Wembley, for England’s 100th international fixture. That Germany lost that night, the first time since the humiliation against the DDR in the World Cup, could be put down to several things. One of which was another footballer who would be deemed surplus to requirements soon enough by his country, but this wasn’t due to his colour. Alan Hudson was a victim of the classic English distrust of the flair player, a prejudice held by those in charge of the game for many years to come, as they equated vision, balance, wit and sleight of foot to be all too associated with ‘foreign’ values. Hudson only won a further two caps after that night, despite decimating an experimental German side with a hand in both goals. Maybe the catcalls got to Kostedde - the 100,000 strong crowd had mercilessly barracked him (needless to say, this was hardly an enlightened time in England either) - but it was no different than what he received in away games across Germany, where the booing and whistling could be silenced, however briefly, with a goal. Maybe things could have worked out differently on the ‘hallowed’ Wembley turf had the sacred pitch not resembled a quagmire that day, as it so often did in England’s damp winters. Rainer Bonhof made a characteristic burst down he left hand side, hitting a first time ball across to the boot of Bernd Holzenbein, who laid it off with a touch for Kostedde. He got bogged down in the mud, and slipped without dignity as a gap opened up wide for him to score, but the ball bobbled away despairingly to safety. He trudged off with just under half an hour to go, replaced by Jupp Heynckes, and would always be left to wonder what would have happened if he had managed to skip into that gaping hole. On such fripperies careers can turn, but according to Hans Milberg, a renowned journalist in NordRhein Westfalia who has been friends with, and followed the career of Erwin Kostedde for years, that it was also due to differences within the squad. He simply wasn’t trusted because of the colour of his skin. Helmut Schön would only pick him one more time. ---------------------------------------------------Everyone knew that he would be leaving the cash-strapped Kickers in the summer. The only question was as to where he would end up. He told kicker, “The club call me all the time, say that I could go to Espanyol or Malaga, but the coach [a young, ambitious man by the name of Otto Rehhagel, who would re-sign him for Dortmund and Werder Bremen, and to whom Kostedde would remain grateful to throughout his life] doesn’twant to give me away.” Offenbach had said they were even considering an offer for him to join up with his newly signed hero, Pelé, at the New York Cosmos. Though this may well have been
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Erwin Kostedde brinkmanship, at transparent ploy to drive up the price of the striker, word had spread about Erwin Kostedde. It was further spurred on by his 1974 goal of the season against Mönchengladbach, where he chested down a long ball from the left and, as cool as you like, watched it drop in front of him before lashing it, left footed, inside the far post. You can watch it on YouTube to this day, where the accompanying ACDC track does some justice to the violence of the brutal strike itself, but little for the vision, languid poise and picture perfect technique. As the last defender between him and the goal, Berti Vogts could only look on in wonder. Georg Kessler was certainly convinced. Hertha had haggled Offenbach down to the still not inconsiderable sum of DM650,000 from the million that was originally demanded. The Morgenpost were happy, but still had a question about his attitude. “How long the jealousy [of other clubs] lasts will to a great extent be dependent on the performance of the dark skinned Kostedde, for whom Berlin could be the end station of his footballing wandering years.” It was a busy couple of days for the press to get their stereotypes in order. Arthur Ashe (‘the Black Gazelle’) had just won Wimbledon for the first time, and now Hertha had signed the ‘Braun Bomber’, a nickname he shared with Joe Louis, which should probably be taken in generous spirits. It, at the very least, kept the comparisons to Gerd Müller (‘der Bomber der Nation’) alive, even if it was due to a tidy piece of alliteration, and to the colour of his skin. They were less gracious to Muhammad Ali, who was still constantly referred to as Cassius Clay, even ten years after he had converted to Islam and changed his name. Nothing would anger the champ more than this slight. Nothing. He saw it as a sign that people were not willing to accept a black man’s opinion on anything. Not even on his own name. So on Wednesday the 9th of July 1975, Erwin Kostedde began his career at Hertha BSC, and it began with the boss ‘Sir’ Georg Kessler red-faced and raging at a missing key to the gates of the Maifeld. It was gloriously sunny, but with a cooling breeze blowing across the pitches in what was, at that time, still the British sector of West Berlin. To this day you will find barely a player who didn’t respect Kessler, precisely because he demanded it himself. Asked about the “not always easy to manage personality” of his new player he responded cryptically, “I know that in Offenbach he was the biggest star... but in my career I’ve often stood in front of such constellations. I integrated Johann Cruyff into the Dutch national team, so Erwin Kostedde will not cause any problems for me.” Whether it would have been a problem for some of his teammates is a different matter. Hunter Davies sums up the feeling of a big new signing under pressure beautifully in his peerless book about a year with Tottenham Hotspur in the early seventies, “The Glory Game”. Ralph Coates had come from far away (geographically and culturally) Burnley, where he had been the undisputed star, to
cosmopolitan Spurs. He had a couple of caps, but was still to make his big international breakthrough. The first team were saying hello and how are you and how’s it going. Everybody stood back to eye him. From the first team down to the apprentices, everybody wanted to have a look... Bill Nicholson had signed him for 190,000... it was his first day at Spurs, the beginning of a new life, new friends, new rituals, new traditions. He had narrow trousers, compared with the first teams obvious flares, and shoes that looked remarkably pointed. Surely even up in darkest Burnley they weren’t still wearing Italian shoes... As he stood nervously grinning in front of his new teammates it must have been terrifying, just remembering his days as an outsider in Münster. He wasn’t wearing the wrong footwear. Whether it was imagined or not he was conscious that day in, day out, I wore the wrong skin colour. Next to him was another newcomer, one who was equally different to the Hertha regulars, in the gangling frame of Stephanus Walbeeck, a central defender who had just signed his first professional contract on transferring from Sparta Rotterdam, and who was continuing his bookkeeping studies. Even this guy, for whom German was definitely and defiantly a second language, and who would think nothing of spending the night poring over his textbooks, the introduction must have been easier going than for Kostedde. But Kessler was happy after the phoney wars of the preseason had been fought. He had a player and a half on his hands. “Kostedde has adapted excellently. His working mentality is very good,” he said. This was important for Erwin as a man who seemed to need reassurance from his bosses, and proves how much he wanted to belong in Berlin - at least at the time. He had had problems with Gyula Lóránt, the Offenbach coach (kicker pointedly described it as a “love hate relationship”), but this could have been down to a number of factors: he was a famously hard man to impress. A perma-frown wearing, Hungarian taskmaster who had played as a centre half for the national team alongside Puskas, Szibor, Kocsis and Hidegkuti – the greatest side never to win the World Cup. He had retired in the wake of the Wunder von Bern in 1954. None of this impressed Kostedde. He simply felt he was always getting at him. “He is a Prussian type. He just commands,” he muttered, leaving little else left to be said on the matter. -----------------------------------------------Hertha won the first game of that 75/76 season, 2-1, at home against FC Köln in front of 60,000 fans, the deciding goal coming in the shape of a penalty when Kostedde was brought down by ‘Sunder’ Strack. Strack was not impressed. “He just let himself fall.... an actor” was his take on events, but the cut on Kostedde’s leg told a different story. But Hertha were on their way and remained unbeaten at the Olympiastadion for 16 months, and despite what one
fan described as “The bitching about Kostedde” they were very happy.
fought for every ball with the iron-willed self-belief that had been drummed into them by their inspirational coach.
It wouldn’t last forever.
What they also needed was a piece of luck, that indefinable dimension which can turn a scrappy performance into a win. Against Schalke, again, Kostedde had missed easy chances, but despite the crowds impatience with a poor performance, Hertha’s impregnable home record remained unblemished. Kostedde received the luck his performances were due in only the fifth minute as he darted through a gap on the left hand side to meet Beer’s flat through ball on the edge of the box. Even he, this man to whom scoring goals meant everything, as his defence against the world, admitted that it was meant as a cross, but the ‘keeper, Nigbur, flapped at the ball and it squirmed inside the back post.
Chants of “Hi-Ha-Ho, Hertha ist K.O.” reverberated around Eintracht Braunschweig’s stadium as they scored their fifth of the afternoon. Wolfgang Sidke had endured a torrid time, “hypnotised” by his opponents and substituted after an hour, but at least Kostedde had got off the mark. Hertha were already 3-0 down at half time, but he headed firmly past ‘keeper Bernd Franke to give the semblance of hope for a comeback. It didn’t happen and Hertha lost 5-2 in the end, with doubts being raised about the team’s enthusiasm and the boss’s tactics. The press were unanimous: Hertha needed a stopper, someone to break up the play in front of the defence, but in the absence of Luggi Müller there was no one there to do the job. The next week at home to newly promoted Karlsruhe heard the first whistles from the crowd at the team that they had so adored the previous year. Despite Kostedde’s diving header for the lead - an Erich Beer free kick, headed back across the box by Uwe Kliemann for him to meet at the back post spectacularly - he missed a sitter just before half time, screwing the ball wide from close range. Kostedde made it three goals in four games the next week as Bayer Uerdigen were turned over 5-0, but he barely got noticed in the rush to congratulate Beer’s spectacular four goals (one of three times he would do it in this season for Hertha). The midfielder topped this off with both goals in the 2-0 win for Germany against Austria in Vienna the following Wednesday. As he was doing just the job he was brought in to do, Kostedde still hadn’t made it back into the national side, and he was overshadowed by a spectacular player behind him who was rapidly becoming a legend in his adopted city. Erich “Ete” Beer was a fantastic player behind the strikers, a German Gianni Rivera. He told 11Freunde that his relationship on the pitch with Kostedde and fellow striker Lorenz Horr was more than congenial. They all loved to play the ball around, in short little triangles, using pace and wit to get through defences, but he was at fault for the 2-1 loss at Fortuna Düsseldorf that served to undermine Hertha’s fragile confidence even more that season. Beer had the ball on his toe on the edge of the box, Hertha were playing well, and were unlucky to be even drawing at this stage, having come back from an early goal. It can only be said that he was thinking about other things, about his neat little triangles, about the prettiest actions, when what was necessary was a piece of lumpen brutality to get the ball clear. Wolfgang Seel took the gift, and scored the winner. The referee had apparently had a stinker, but that is of little importance here. Hertha had lost that little something that had set them apart from the chasing pack in the previous season. That minutest of percentages that made the difference, when everyone
It was Arnold Palmer who said, with a bit of venom oozing out of his sarcastically curled lips, that “the more I practice, the luckier I get”. He was, of course, correct. The margins in professional sport can be so thin as to end up translucent. Kostedde had fluked that goal against Schalke, but he had been regularly scoring, and the statements his goals made convinced him that he would get back into the national team, and into the hearts of the country that he so wanted to love him. The next week, all that hard work came off as Hertha played their best game of the season by some distance, beating the champions, Mönchengladbach, who had just been named the best team in Europe by France Football, 3-0. Two for Erwin, one for ‘Ete’. Hertha pulled themselves up to fifth in the Bundesliga the next week, destroying their hex away from home with a 6-2 spanking of Hanover 96. Again Beer scored four, again Kostedde scored another one. Hertha were simply devastating on that uncharacteristically beautiful October afternoon. In his column for the Morgenpost, Gunter Weise wrote, “Never before on a foreign ground have Hertha played with such self confidence...”. He raved about the pair playing together as if they were walking through a dream, such was the devastating edge they brought to Hertha’s game. In the Mönchengladbach game Kostedde had again tormented Berti Vogts, twisting him inside and out, pushing the little man to the very extend of his significant capabilities. In the build up to Kostedde’s last ever game for the national team, that coming Wednesday against Greece, he and Beer were on fire. They were the talk of the nation that didn’t have a common border with the city they were playing in. Fate, as some call it, or whatever the coincidental little twists and turns that take place in otherwise unconnected lives, can be a funny thing. In Erwin Kostedde’s second international match, he had been outshone by Alan Hudson, a man who would never fit into a myopic England team, and who would barely play for his country again. Against Greece on the 11th of October, 1975, his final game would become known primarily for being the last appearance of possibly the most gifted player that Germany had ever produced, the extraordinary Günter Netzer - another man whose talent was deemed somehow to have an irresponsible edge to it, and who slipped somehow through the cracks in
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Erwin Kostedde international football. The man who never felt that he had won the World Cup a year earlier. Nobody today remembers that European Championship qualifier for Kostedde’s final, goalless, match for Germany. Instead they remember Netzer’s final goalless match for his country - if they remembered the game at all. In a letter to ZDF’s ‘Hörzu’, ‘Raymondos M’ remembered only the mindless chatter of commentator Oskar Wark, as he griped “He has as little idea about football as a cow does about Sundays.” Georg Kessler had been in Alkmaar a week later, watching AZ (the side he would go on to manage to the 1981 UEFA Cup final) draw 1-1 with Ajax, the side managed by Rinus Michels, the genius who was one of his successors as the ‘Bondscoach’. Though it was a preparatory mission, Kessler knew how the three times European Cup Winners would set out their stall against Hertha in the UEFA Cup the next week. Shorn of names such as Cruyff, Haan, Muhren and Rep, They would sit tight, deeper than an antlion in its pit, waiting for its prey to fall in. They would sit and wait and watch with a patience that immediately let its victim believe it had a chance, just until the blinding moment of attack when it would all be over in a snap. Again the Olympiastadion was full to the rafters for the visit of the side that could be sougly when they needed to be, whilst all the time bringing to mind visions of aching beauty. That night, Kostedde lit up the night sky above Charlottenburg with a beautiful goal on the spin inside the far post after a ball from Beer, as if it could have come from anyone else. Though they celebrated a historic win, everyone knew that their goose was cooked. Ajax had done more than enough to go through with a second leg still to play at home. A Beer free kick expertly picked out Kostedde for Hertha’s only goal in Amsterdam, but Ajax scored four. Just as all seemed to be improving, in truth it was a season that was stalling like a Porsche with a Trabant’s two-stroke engine. The fans were dwindling, and the catcalls were growing with every performance, but still, the last time that Hertha BSC had lost at home, in April 1974, Brazil had still been the world champions. The world had done a lot of turning since then, and in Berlin the minutiae of every day life simply rolled on regardless of the wall. Hertha’s remarkable record had to go at some point - all dynasties end in indignity as most of our lives end in nappies and infirmity - but, still, the performance against Duisburg that ended the 19 month unbeaten home run was staggering in its flabby ineptitude. Again Kostedde had scored an early goal against HSV the previous week, but they lost. Again Beer opened the scoring against Duisburg with another perfectly placed free kick, bending into the near post from the left hand side of the 18-yard box, but again they lost. The crowd was down to 20,000, leaving swathes of empty spaces in a cavernous place such as the Olympiastadion, and those who were there whistled the
team as they left. They whistled the team, they whistled Kessler and they whistled Kostedde. He hung his head leaving the pitch, gutted, having missed three easy chances including a free header onto the bar and an open goal from ten yards out that he blasted so far over the bar it wouldn’t land again until Prenzlauerberg was free of socialism and populated by the schiki-micki who hadn’t even been born yet. It was the type of chance he had made his career taking. That he didn’t signalled something was wrong, but then something was wrong in the camp itself. They had lost their will to fight for the cause. They had lost more than a game and a home record. Three points would have put them up to fourth in the Bundesliga for the first time since they came in second six months previously. Beer and Kostedde still sat in first and third respectively in the goalscoring lists, but the momentum had been blown away. The following week Kostedde scored a beauty, a swivelling volley with his right foot from near the penalty spot after he burst typically through one gap and into another against Fortuna Düsseldorf, but they threw away a 2-0 lead to draw 2-2. Kessler was livid, his face growing redder as his team contrived to give points away. An excellent 4-2 win over Bochum included another two for Kostedde, but he was missing more chances by this point than he should have been. His confidence dwindling with the crowds. They were down to 10,000 in the Bochum and Düsseldorf games, a scrappy 1-0 win over Kostedde’s old club, Offenbach (who were on their way to relegation) drew just over 14,000. It would reach its nadir as 10,000 witnessed a 0-0 draw with Werder Bremen. Hertha finished in twelfth place in 1975/76. After the Bremen game they lost to Kaiserslautern, Duisburg, Bochum and 7-4 against Bayern on the last day of the season (bizarrely, they became a beacon of glamorous attacking football idiocy in the final two games scoring eight, and winning neither). They drew with Mönchengladbach, HSV, Essen and Eintracht, while beating only Hanover along the way. Erwin Kostedde was already on his way out by those last two insane games. His final game in the blue and white shirt of Hertha BSC was on March the 27th in the draw with a Mönchengladbach side who would deservedly go on to defend their title. Erich Beer came second in the top scorer’s list, with 23 for the season. On that last Saturday Kostedde dropped out of the top ten for the first time all year – he had scored 14 goals and came in 11th place. ------------------------------------------------------------It is probably fair to say that by this point Erwin Kostedde no longer really cared about the denouement to the 1975/76 season. He was already away, packed of to Ischia, off the south coast of Italy, to try and heal his Achilles injury. Or at least that is what the club said. His signing for Dortmund was mentioned in the
Tagesspiegel in a meagre 100 words as the sports pages concentrated on the Montreal Olympic games. It said that Hertha wouldn’t leave a stone in the way of his move, as his wife was unhappy in Berlin, and they would, in any case, receive almost the same as what they had paid a year ago. In the interview he gave to Piorr years later he said there were other reasons for leaving, which he would not expand upon. He admitted, sure, his wife was unhappy. It was Berlin, an island, with a wall at the bottom of the street, and a 100 mile corridor in and out, but he also felt wanted by Rehhagel. Rehhagel understood him, and it is this which would be the largest factor in Erwin Kostedde’s life - his search for acceptance for who he was. As much as he respected Georg Kessler, he didn’t feel needed. One of the most common terms used to describe him has always been as an enfant terrible, the French somehow having a more romantic way of looking at those they see as being their problem children. Erwin lived the good life when he could, but his drinking and partying was destructive, and driven by the block between him and his countrymen that he faced each and every day. He was booed by his own fans at Dortmund, and began to climb back down the ladder in footballing class - that fucking ladder that always seems to have fewer rungs on the way down. He returned to Belgium and to France where he had happy seasons, scoring freely again, and enjoying the life of being a big fish in a smaller pond, and had a beautiful final hurrah at Bremen, but he has never forgotten the abuse he faced from being just a boy in Münster to being a grown man, hiding the tears as thousands of people taunted and screamed vile insults at him. As long as he could answer with goals, then he would be okay. But when they dried up, he was left naked, and alone on the field. That Kostedde’s career was not helped by his excesses is beyond question, but in this he was far from alone. Football was a different world then to how it is now. Footballers could go out drinking, they could go on the rampage, and be treated in the normal world as normal idiots. Erwin Kostedde was a star who was lucky. In any other field he wouldn’t have made it to the levels where he could enjoy money and prestige like he could as a footballer. But despite the fact that Berlin was better in many ways - it was the city that Martin Luther King had visited, and that had demonstrated in support of Angela Davis while she was imprisoned - he remained, at the very least inside of himself, the last surviving black kid in Münster.
about 14 goals in 26 games? He was unfortunate that he had come into a side where expectations were too high after a stunning previous season. He wasn’t entirely blamed for that at all, and nor should he have been, but his career speaks volumes about how far football has come in dealing with ‘difficult’ players, about black players and about ourselves and our own prejudices. This was everyday life in a distant land. Hertha would go on to field numerous black guys with innuendos about their ‘work rate’ and ‘arrogance’ rarely coming to light. The next season they played with a sponsor on their shirt for the first time. They would soon enough be playing against teams from the former DDR in a unified Bundesliga. The world was slowly changing. Things are getting better now, but for Erwin Kostedde, living on a meagre pension near Münster, and haunted by the things he heard his whole life, that far off land won’t seem so distant.
Jacob Sweetman March 2012
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I coudn’t contact Erwin Kostedde in time to ask him about his time in Berlin, but wish him well and hope that he receives the respect and good health that is his due. The article would not have been possible without the help of: Hans Milberg Ralf Piorr Klaus-Dieter Vollrath
Jimmy Hartwig followed Erwin Kostedde’s mighty footsteps and played for Germany in 1979. As he put it, “Even now when a dark skinned rapper - even one with a big mouth - becomes a best-selling author and gets his life turned into a film, for me that is a completely different world. I was born barely ten years after the war, and, as a schoolboy, I heard daily “under Adolf this wouldn’t have happened, that a nigger could run around with us”. Kostedde’s leaving of Berlin was accompanied by words such as ‘disappointment’ and ‘unfulfilled potential’ which retain a whiff of revisionism, after all, what is disappointing
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From the (recent) No Dice archives
The waiting game comes easily as Union dominate Dresden
Posted 13/02/2012. You can read further match reports every week at www.nodicemagazine.com Sixty-one long and not terribly sunny days had separated the end of last season from the start of the current one for 1.FC Union. Sixty-one days of waiting around, tapping on tables and talking about transfers. In England the summer used to be the cricket season – football was a winter sport, and had no place being played in the sunshine. Things are different now, with the most popular sport on earth hanging around through the year – like a pair of played-in socks stuck behind the washing basket, the stink of football has worked its way into every corner of our lives.
communication with Christian Stuff was superb. Far too often this season has seen the Union defence going in different directions, when coherence has to be the order of the day. He was far from alone in showing his mettle, in being unawed by the team that had humiliated them. His mistake towards the end, gifting the ball to Mickaël Poté came on the back of a succession of passes sprayed around the pitch to rapturous ‘Ole’s’. It was, to use the common term, just like watching Brazil, and by that point Union could have got away with murder.
But for a so-called winter sport, the winter break this year had taken a bloody long time to finish.
The crowd roared as they so often do at the Alte Försterei. Dresden’s fans always make a special spectacle, but Union played the ball around calmly, the home debut for Tijani Belaid, impressive, deft and full of style. He is not a likefor-like Mattuschka replacement, he doesn’t charge around as much, but has a keen eye, and a gift of making his minimal touches count. His passing was at times sublime, stroking the ball around with the minimum of fuss, never over hitting it, never under. It was always just right.
It had taken only four days fewer for Union to come back home after the hungover 5-0 humping at the hands of the upwardly mobile Greuther Fürth. An inordinately long time to wait when the season is only halfway through. Would their momentum be lost, would the meaningless defeats on a jaunt to Spain suddenly be the signs of a squad that had been punching above their weight, and were due to get back into the ring with a Dynamo Dresden side that had comprehensively beaten them 4-0 once already? Fifty-seven days until they could sing Nina Hagen’s paean to the club and the fans. The line “Wir aus dem Osten” is bellowed on match days by those to whom it means most, and they had had to sit on their hands and hold their voices for fifty-seven days – eight days longer than the reigns of Popes’ Urban the 7th, Boniface the 6th (where do they get these names from?) and Celestine the 4th put together. The Union fans would also, no doubt, take great glee in reminding themselves that this fifty-seven day pause from their most successful ever 2.Bundesliga season was five days longer than the entire tenure of the, now former, coach Michael Skibbe across the city at a doomed-looking, listless Hertha BSC. Last week Union had been unlucky against Paderborn, but at home against Dresden it was impossible that they could even conceive of losing. They would have to do so without their talismanic captain Torsten Mattuschka. They would have to do so without the slightly less talismanic Ahmed Madouni. Christoph Menz was sick. As a converted right-back, he had become a bulwark in Union’s defence, his reading of the game belying his callowness in the position. The surprise this time came in that Michael Parensen would take his place, a slight, left footed player of touch and vision. Not what you would imagine a centre half to be. But Parensen was excellent.. His reading of the game vital against a speedy Dresden forward line, and his
He would have had his first goal for the club too, had Christopher Quiring not decided that it was he who should take the penalty granted in the 44th minute. The young winger raced the length of the pitch and snatched the ball away, ‘this one is mine, mate’. This took some balls, and it is heartening to see. This Union side are no shrinking violets, and they will fight to the very end. John-Jairo Mosquera had already missed a sitter, a chance that landed at his feet and said ‘kick me’ like it was pinned on to the back of a teacher by a naughty schoolboy. He side-footed wide from 3 yards when the whole goal was free, but kept going as, in the second half, he made it 2-0 as he forced the ball past ‘keeper Wolfgang Hesl after lovely approach play from Belaid and Quiring. Union were cruising and Simon Terrode’s two goals were the icing on the cake in front of the uproarious home fans. He is a traditional striker, big and strong, playing with his back to goal and always willing to hold the ball up, bringing his team-mates into play from behind. Union wouldn’t dare say that they didn’t want to level the four goals conceded last year. They did. This was about bragging rights as much as it was about three points. They are flying now, and will not have to wait through as many long, long daysfor their next home win as they did for this one.
Jacob Sweetman
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Germania Schรถneiche v LFC Berlin 3-1 25.02.12 - by Emily Sweetman
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TÜRKIYEMSPOR
The Rise and Fall of the Kreuzberg Nationalmannschaft by Stephen Glennon Türkiyemspor played their last game before the 2011/12 Winterpause on December 11th, 2011, a 4-1 defeat at home to Torgelower SV. Soon afterwards, the club applied for insolvency, the first menʼs team was dissolved and the team automatically relegated to the Berlin-Liga (6th division).
themselves in danger in order to support their team. With predictable regularity, they were subjected to racist abuse while supporting the club, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – abuse that was physical as well as verbal.
‘At home’ is something of a misnomer - the game was played in the Ludwig- Friedrich-Jahn-Sportpark in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg area. The short history of Türkiyemspor, however, is inherently linked with the Kreuzberg district, where the club was formed as Izmirspor in 1978 by a group of Turkish immigrants.
Aumeier is a charismatic presence, gesticulating energetically as he makes his point – of which there are many. He notes the abuse he, as a Fenerbahçe fan, attracts from rival Besiktas fans in Istanbul, but removing the yellow and blue Fenerbahçe scarf is sufficient to end the vitriol. Türkiyemspor fans in the nineties had no such luxury – it was their dark hair and eyes that attracted trouble. For them, being treated equally was not as easy as simply removing an item of clothing.
Clubs founded by immigrants were nothing unusual in the seventies and eighties, as so-called Gastarbeiter from Turkey and beyond carved out little pieces of home in their new habitat. The trend began with Türkspor in 1965 and slowly gathered a momentum that saw the creation of Hürtürk (now Hürtürkel), Hilalspor, and many others. By the time Izmirspor had changed its name to Türkiyemspor in 1987, the club had risen meteorically to the Landesliga, then the fourth tier of German football. Attendances for the level were remarkable, with around 1,000 fans present for most games, and an incredible 11,949 (or even more – plenty of fans without tickets found their way into the Poststadion) for the big derby with Hertha BSC, as the Old Ladyʼs slump to the Oberliga (then 3rd division) coincided with yet another promotion for Türkiyemspor. Harald Aumeier was a Türkiyemspor fan during these halcyon days, and remembers them well. “We were the number one in Berlin for one year,” he recalled, “Hertha went down to the Oberliga, to our league, and we had more fans than Hertha in this year.” That Hertha won 2-0 in the packed Poststadion was of no consequence to Aumeier – his ʻnumber oneʼ has little to do with what happened on the field. To him, like to many Turkish immigrants at the time, Türkiyemspor was a symbol, a rallying point, and having more fans than the cityʼs biggest team was an enormous fillip to the immigrant community in Berlin. According to Aumeier, “You constantly hear racist things because you have black hair, you look a little bit different … every time you feel that you are not equal. And then came Türkiyemspor. Türkiyemspor showed on the field that if we have equal conditions and equal rights, we can win. And we give the winning feeling to the people who were losing all the time.” This feeling was so important to Aumeier and numerous other Türkiyemspor fans that they were willing to put
He speaks reverentially of Türkiyemspor, especially when remembering those risky away days in the former DDR after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Türkiyemspor fans often had stones thrown at them by opposition fans. “It was really adventurous,” he said as he regaled me with numerous tales of encounters on the terraces. One of them involved a friend of his who supported Union Berlin, traditionally a club considered to be opposed to the DDR regime and therefore subject to plenty of hostility from clubs seen as more loyal to the authorities. According to Aumeier, “I told him, if you want to see real danger, take a Türkiyemspor jersey and come with us one time! And he came with us one time and he said, I’ve never seen anything like that - so prejudicial, so… shocking.” But not all of Türkiyemsporʼs trips to the former DDR were negative experiences. Against Brieske Senftenberg, as a crowd of 200 opposition fans closed in on a small party of Türkiyemspor followers, Aumeier was certain that trouble was afoot. The crowd, however, began anti-fascist chanting. “It was a big surprise for us,” said Aumeier, “there is an anti-racist movement in east Germany too.” I met with Aumeier in a Turkish tea shop on Admiralstr, an unofficial gathering point for Türkiyemspor fans. To modern ears, the idea of a Türkiyemspor fan is quite oxymoronic – in that last game against Torgelower SV, in stark contrast to the thousands present two decades earlier, only fifty people were in attendance. It had been over fifteen years since average attendances were over a couple of hundred. In the 20,000-seater Jahnpark, such tiny figures lent an eerie, sombre feel to every game, as though the death knells had been ringing out for Türkiyemspor ever since they were required to move there due to their promotion to the Regionalliga in 2008. The reasons for and consequences of the move are a sore
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Türkiyemspor point for both those connected with Türkiyemspor and the local government authorities that helped make it happen. Before the promotion to the Regionalliga, Türkiyemspor played in the Willi-Kressman-Stadion in Kreuzberg, one of two grass pitches in Kreuzberg/Friedrichshain. That stadium, however, was held to be unsuitable for the Regionalliga – hence the move north. In such a densely populated area as Kreuzberg, the competition for the grass pitches was always going to be fierce, especially when one considers the numerous youth teams that most football clubs have. Aumeier is in no doubt as to which team should have been given preferences for the pitches. “We are the biggest club in Kreuzberg/Friedrichshain. So for me, it’s logical,” he claims. “The government of Kreuzberg/Friedrichshain [should say], ok, Türkiyemspor has to use these pitches. Both of them. Because the first team is playing in the Oberliga or Regionalliga, the U-19 and U-17 play in the Regionalliga (the second-highest level of youth team competition in Germany) and they need grass pitches for training experience. They say no, there’s a club that plays in the 8th, 9th, 10th leagues for 100 years at Laskarplatz (the other grass pitch in Kreuzberg/Friedrichshain), we cannot throw them out, they say.” We have clearly hit upon a topic that Aumeier feels strongly about. He goes on to tell me how Türkiyemspor had to train in the parks at Hasenheide and Teufelsberg due to the lack of other options, a situation that culminated with the team training outside the Rathaus Kreuzberg as a protest in 2008. To try to understand the intricacies of sporting bureaucracy in Berlin, I spoke to Dr. Peter Beckers, the deputy mayor of Kreuzberg. He explained that pitches are allocated according to the Sportanlagennutzungsverordnung, a weighty 28-page document outlining everything from pitch allocation conditions to the placing of advertisements on the sporting grounds, and much more in between. Particularly of interest is Section II-4 Allocation Criteria (Vergabegrundsätze), subsection (9), which states: For the day-to-day allocation of sport facilities […] the requirements of the users are to be prioritised in the following order: 1. Schools, 2. Regional sports centres and federal training centres, 3. Sports organisations worthy of promotion (förderungswürdige Sportorganisationen) carrying out practical, educational or competitive exercises for children and young adults, 4. High schools for student-oriented educational purposes, 5. Sports organisations worthy of promotion (förderungswürdige Sportorganisationen) carrying out practical, educational or competitive exercises 6. Adult education centres […]. It appears as though, after state organs, youth work is to be prioritised, followed by sporting organisations not carrying out youth work. The condition, however, appears quite
arbitrary – what exactly is worthy of promotion? And who decides it? I asked Dr Beckers about the Türkiyemspor training pitch fiasco. “I have to think, because I wasn’t in charge of this department then,” he recalled. “I remember there was a pretty heavy discussion because Türkiyemspor absolutely wanted to have a pitch in Kreuzberg and there just weren’t any grass pitches available, I think that was the problem… We only have one grass pitch (sic), that’s the one at Laskarplatz, and that’s very much in demand.” That pitch is currently occupied by Berolina Stralau of the Bezirksliga (8th division) and BSV Viktoria Friedrichshain of the Kreisliga (9th division). The requirement to play on a grass pitch only exists from the Regionalliga (4th division). Dr Beckers, after informing me for no discernable reason that “I’m getting the feeling that you think we’re somehow discriminating against Türkiyemspor,” went on to explain the significant efforts by the district of Kreuzberg to give the club what they need. “… Weʼve really spent a lot of money on Türkiyemspor so they can play in Kynaststraße, so they can use that grass pitch. No other team in the Bezirk got that, got an investment like that.” “The problem is that when a team doesn’t get what they want, they always feel discriminated against,” he continued. “That’s not unusual and part of the job. What is unusual is that a team like Türkiyemspor gets a pitch rented by us from a neighbouring district that costs us €80,000 every year. That’s a lot, that’s really a lot. Really. So other teams look at that and ask, why Türkiyemspor? Why are they given preferential treatment? So we tell them that Türkiyemspor is a team that really needs a grass pitch, they have a men’s team that plays at a very high level.” Beckersʼ standpoint is backed up by Cumali Kangal, the former chairman of the Türkisches Sportbegegnungszentrum (TSM), an umbrella organisation created to support multicultural sporting organisations in their liaisons with governmental structures, amongst other things. “I have spoken to the mayor and the Sportamt (branch of local government dealing with issues related to sport) on behalf of Türkiyemspor but the Sportamt just don’t have any options,” explained Kangal, “there aren’t enough pitches. They don’t seem to have any money.” Aumeier, however, is categorical in his disagreement – “It’s structural racism, for me. Nothing more, nothing less. Because we have no lobby, we have no people on the inside ... It’s so frustrating to see how the German majority looks at us,” he says. The reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle. Kangal, a tactful, softlyspoken man in his sixties, certainly gave the impression the various governmental agencies that he had dealt during with his time as chairman of the TSM had done their utmost to facilitate Türkiyemspor with the limited resources available to them – Kreuzberg, quite simply, does not have the resources to provide every football club with
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Türkiyemspor what they need. While the plans for a number of new pitches in Tempelhof should relieve the pressure somewhat, at present the task of trying to keep every club happy appears monumental.
three non-Germans per squad were permitted, it was clear that the DFL (German football league) needed to make some alterations to their legislation left behind by the changing times.
My dealings with Dr. Beckers, however, left me feeling as though he was not completely aware of the importance of a sense of belonging to the non-German sections of the local community, and even less aware that not all clubs with a foreign name are the same. When asked about the importance of Türkiyemspor in Kreuzberg, he replied, “we have lots and lots of teams with Turkish names. There’s Akrispor (sic), Al-Deriemspor (sic) and Türkiyemspor of course. So it’s not as though Türkiyemspor is the only team that overwhelmingly has players of Turkish origins.”
A rule was introduced, stating that non-German footballers would be considered to be German for footballing purposes if they had played in Germany for five years, at least three of which were as a junior player. It may not seem like much in these days of EU-driven free movement of workers, but at the time, it was a monumental change that validated and recognised the contribution of thousands of non-German football players in Germany. This one piece of legislation set the wheels in motion that finally led to a Turkish-born player representing Germany at international level – Mustafa Dogon in 1999. That Dogon only made two appearances for Germany when a decision to represent Turkey may have resulted in a lot more international caps vindicates Ümit Karanʼs decision to focus his attentions on the Turkish national team rather than the German one. Clearly, there was still a lot of work to be done to progress from Dogonʼs symbolic cameos to Mesut Özil, the German/ Turkish creative fulcrum of the current German national team.
Such an opinion reveals a fundamental ignorance of the reasons behind the founding of many immigrant cubs in the seventies and eighties. While Türkiyem was originally intended to be a club for people from Izmir, it quickly broadened its horizons to include not only all of Turkey, but everyone who wanted to join, regardless of where they were from (this, however, would not immediately be clear if one examines solely the name – ʻTürkiyemʼ means ʻmy Turkeyʼ). Many other clubs have clear political leanings, or represent a specific minority – Hilalspor, for example, was founded by Muslims for Muslims. Hürtürkel, a non-political club also founded by immigrants in 1980, have even gone as far as to consider changing their name to something more Germansounding in order to avoid the preconceptions that come with having a Turkish name. As co-founder Zafer Külekci told Victoria Schwenzer in her excellent essay “Hürtürkel and the search for a German name”, teams with a Turkish name are usually considered to be the guilty party when it comes to conflicts in the lower leagues. “To avoid this, weʼre talking about changing our name,” Külekci said. “Then they will have to treat us fairly.” That Türkiyemspor is still alive despite these difficulties, Aumeier observes, is the clubʼs biggest success. The club was founded by individuals with minimal education, no idea of how to run an organisation, only a rudimentary grasp of German and negligible funds (provided by local Turkish small businessmen), yet still managed to catapult its menʼs team up through the divisions and set up a youth team system that helped provide much needed leisure activities for what has always been one of Berlinʼs poorest districts. It was through this youth system that Ümit Karan began his footballing career, a career that eventually lead him to represent one of Turkeyʼs most successful teams, Galatasaray, as well as the Turkish national team a total of twelve times, scoring six goals. Karanʼs rise to international football was facilitated by a much-needed change in German football rules brought about by the make-up of the Türkiyemspor squad in the late eighties and early nineties. Then, the team was comprised overwhelmingly of non-Germans. Since they were pushing for promotion into the professional leagues, where only
Nonetheless, Karan is a legend in Kreuzberg, and kids in the Türkiyemspor youth team strive to emulate his success. That the high profile menʼs team was disbanded in order to preserve the important youth work as soon as the insolvency process began is indicative of the motivations behind Türkiyemspor. Of course, the menʼs team is an imperative organ in that it generates attention and gives the youth team players a clearly defined goal to strive towards, but emphasis is plainly upon giving an outlet to the Kreuzberger youth. As Aumeier says, “Türkiyemspor showed young people that you can come here and no one will say, you’re a bad Turkish guy, you’re bad people from Afghanistan or something like that - you come to Türkiyemspor and you are Türkiyemspor. Nothing more. Every single person is welcome.” The club also recently set up a womenʼs team, initially investigating the reasons why similar ventures by other migrant-founded clubs were not successful. They noted that after the primary enthusiasm died down, the players began to prioritise family, work and other concerns over football. So the decision was made to initially begin with only a youth team, and create new teams as the players in that team grew older together. Now the Türkiyemspor womenʼs team, trained by former menʼs player Murat Dogan (who, like most who work with Türkiyemspor, voluntarily gives up his free time to help out), is pushing for promotion from the Bezirksliga, and features three international players for Azerbaijan. This, however, is not to suggest that Türkiyemspor is the only club that actively promotes youth work, womenʼs football and policies to improve integration. Dersimspor, also based in Kreuzberg, has a womenʼs team that plays in
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Türkiyemspor the Regionalliga (and also competed in the first womenʼs football game in Iran since the 1979 Revolution, a 2-2 draw with the Iranian national team), as well as numerous youth teams. In recognition of their excellent work, Dersimspor was award the BFV Integration Prize in 2009. Türkiyemspor was awarded second place in the honourʼs inaugural year, 2008, as well as the inaugural DFB Integration Prize in 2007, a nationwide prize to recognise football clubs performing excellent integration work in their community. When one hears of the large number of clubs performing similar work in the same neighbourhood, one canʼt help but think that increased co-operation between, or even fusion of the clubs could provide in even better results. The mostdiscussed possible merger has been between Türkiyemspor and Berliner Athletik Klub 07, a German team founded in 1907 that became one of Berlinʼs socalled multicultural teams in 2004 by merging with BFC Güneyspor und Fenerbahce Berlin, and underwent a short-lived name change to Berlin Ankaraspor Kulübü 07 between 2006 and 2011 as part of a co-operation with Turkish club Ankaraspor. As Türkiyemspor slid out of the Regionalliga in 2011 without a single victory all season, their place was taken by BAK, who now sit comfortably in the top half of the division. There is a certain amount of rivalry between the two teams, especially when one considers how many players and staff have switched between the two in recent years. The current manager of BAK is Fikret Ceylan, a man widely known as ʻMr. Türkiyemsporʼ. He had occupied the same position with the Kreuzberg team for twenty-five years, before acrimonious boardroom conflict forced him out. Cumali Kangal, in his position as chairman of the Türkisches Sportbegegnungszentrum, tried on a number of occasions to create a situation where the teams could talk about joining forces. “I tried at least 3 or 4 times to bring both boards together to arrange a fusion, BAK, Yesilyurt (another team founded by Turkish immigrants that went bust in 2008) and Türkiyem…” He trails off, sounding sad and regretful. “The first meeting was ok, second there were certain… concerns from the various parties and the third and fourth [meetings]… that was it.” He chooses his words carefully, clearly anxious to avoid assigning blame to any one party. “There were conflicts that weren’t openly discussed,” is his diplomatic last word. He believes that the fusion could have been successful – for one, there would have been a lot more money available to the team. “There are sponsors that would have financed [the new team]. Instead of financing three clubs, there would have been one, a successful one with that financial support.” He continued, “But not just the board was against the fusion, the fans were too. What should be the name? Who should be on the board? These are seemingly more important than the team. Always the same spats.” Aumeierʼs stance on the issue confirms that the fans were against it too. “At BAK there are many old Türkiyemspor guys - we love them, but BAK is a different thing,” he said, “if they try now to make a multi-culti club, I can only laugh
at that, because they don’t know what multi-culti is. They know it is an image and they have to use it, but they don’t do it.” The one thing that Aumeier, Kangal and Beckers all agree upon is that the death of Türkiyemspor had a lot to do with how unprofessionally the club was run. One can excuse this fact perhaps for the initial decade, as the clubʼs founders came to terms with the magnitude of the task and just how much potential the club had. That unprofessional leadership still blights the club some twenty years after the glory days is a damning indictment on enormous number of presidents and board members that have been through the Türkiyemspor revolving doors. Aumeier, as usual, does not mince his words. “We need Nachhaltigkeit,” he says. “Sustainability. Long-term planning. Our problem is that we have no structure. OK. We can live with no structure; a little bit of anarchy is good for everybody. But every year we change our board members. Or two times, three times.” He goes on to explain how old presidents do not speak with new presidents, how important documents disappear with each revolution – each time, it seems, the club is forced to start again at the beginning as all the relationships built up (with other teams, with sponsors, with fans) fall by the wayside. “Nobody can make a club run long-term like this,” he says frustratedly. With further examination, it is clear that Türkiyemspor was very much a victim of its initial success. The teamʼs meteoric rise through the divisions in the eighties garnered a great deal more publicity in Turkey than it did in Germany, to the extent that Türkiyemspor games were broadcast live on Turkish television, including the first-ever all-Turkish Berlin Cup final – Yesilyurtʼs 2-1 win over Türkiyem in 2001. Even the youth teamʼs recent visit to Turkey for a training camp was mentioned in Turkish newspapers. Thus, the position as Türkiyemspor president is a prestigious one. According to Aumeier, “He [the president] gets invites from the Turkish consulate. He gets invites from Turkish newspapers. If he goes to Turkey and says I’m the president of Türkiyemspor, he doesn’t have to pay in most hostels. It’s a big thing to be Türkiyemspor.” And, of course, he who occupies a much sought-after position will have plenty of rivals for the post, leading to conflict, infighting and shorttermism. Türkiyemsporʼs leadership issues, however, are not all about megalomaniacs struggling for power – far from it. In the clubʼs early years, the principles were simple – this is a club for everyone, no exceptions, no discrimination. But this feeling that it belonged to everyone made a downturn in its fortunes inevitable. It was precisely what large numbers of immigrants needed at a difficult time for the integration process in Germany, but as needs diverge over time, they cannot all be fulfilled. Should the clubʼs priority be youth development? Or should the focus be the high-profile menʼs team? Can they exist without each other? Türkiyemsporʼs participation in an anti-homophobia project in 2010 illustrated that the direction of the clubʼs philosophy is just as responsible for conflict as the power struggles. The
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Türkiyemspor clubʼs confrontation of one of footballʼs last taboos, as much as it may have aligned with their ethos of nondiscrimination, resulted in still further boardroom conflict, as certain members argued that it was not the clubʼs responsibility to get involved in such issues. The club did get involved, and was awarded the Berliner Tulpe (a prize awarded to organisers of Turkish/German projects designed to increase a sense of community and togetherness in Berlin) for its efforts. The clubʼs participation in the project was extremely forward thinking and courageous, especially when one considers that even now, two years later, there are no openly homosexual professional footballers in Germany. These constant clashes have been a large contributory factor in the rapidly decreasing fanbase over the years – fans were consistently alienated as the club necessarily honed and developed its ideology. Nothing makes a fan lose interest as quickly as the feeling that his or her input is not valued within the club, and with the close, almost emotional connection that the fans had with the club in the late eighties, it seemed as though everyone had their own idea of what Türkiyemspor should do, what players they should sign, who the president should be, what the club should be. Cumali Kangal identifies the teamʼs failure to achieve promotion to the 2.Bundesliga in the 1990/91 campaign as the turning point in both the fanʼs relationship with the club, and the clubʼs on-field success. The season was an enormously controversial one – Türkiyemspor were forced to replay three games after the BFV (Berlin football association) granted playing clearance to the Türkiyem player Piotr Podkowick, but retrospectively revoked it after a complaint from fellow promotion hunters and Podkowikʼs former team, Hertha 03 Zehlendorf. Türkiyem won the replayed games again, but at a cost – the three extra games left them drained for the final game of the season. They lost 5-0 to second-placed Tennis Borussia in the final game, who thus leapfrogged them into first place. According to Kangal, the Türkiyemspor board had been anxious to avoid promotion to the 2.Bundesliga. The step up would have required not only largescale investment in new players, but also a much higher level of competition on a national, rather than regional level. Such a decision is not unusual – in last yearʼs NOFV Oberliga, the top two teams rejected promotion to the Regionalliga, preferring to stabilise for another year in the same division. The key difference, however, is that those clubs made their intentions perfectly clear from an early stage, keeping their fans informed and not allowing expectations to build up. Türkiyem, however, failed to communicate their reluctance to take the step up, and the fans felt betrayed and taken for granted. “From that game on, the fans drew back a bit, and didn’t support the team like before,” claims Kangal. Aumeier agrees that communication has always been one of Türkiyemsporʼs biggest problems. “You have to speak with them [the fans], co-ordinate with them, give them a
room to meet. At the beginning of Türkiyemspor we were so successful that we didn’t have to think about this, because of the movement. Everybody came, more and more and more and you are happy and no-one thought that it could stop,” he says. But the success did stop, and as the feeling of invincibility granted by numerous promotions dissipated, the fans, with no other real connection with the club, did too. One could spend weeks investigating the enormous number of reasons for the behind-the-scenes conflicts at Türkiyemspor. There is little value, however, in examining the reasons why history repeats itself. Simply put, a cycle needs to be broken. Cumali Kangal told a telling anecdote of a former Türkiyem president who invested 300,000 DM of his own money into the club without the knowledge of his wife. When it came to a general meeting of the board, at which his wife was present, he was unable to answer questions from his fellow board members as to where the money came from, lest he incur her wrath. This may be a compelling and charming illustration of just how important Türkiyemspor was to local businessmen on an emotional rather than financial level, but also clearly demonstrates the lack of professionalism and sustainability of the clubʼs financial structure.
precise reason – their fans feel involved in the running of the club, and also as though their input is valued. Quite literally, you canʼt put a price on loyalty. Türkiyemspor are a long way away from filling stadia as easily as St. Pauli and Union do, but the fanbase is there. Itʼs just dormant, alienated by years of onpitch mediocrity, but also by the lack of communication, ambition without clear structure and arbitrary personal allegiances to the conflicting factions within the club.
One cannot help but be struck by a glaring irony when watching Türkiyemspor play. On the field, players communicate in German, Arabic and Turkish – and no small measure of success is achieved. Togetherness, cooperation and communication are evident as the players work as a cohesive unit to achieve their common goals. If only that strategy was implemented at boardroom level, Türkiyemspor would once more be a force to be reckoned with.
Stephen Glennon March 2012
As recently as six months ago, it seemed as though Türkiyemsporʼs finances were taking a step in the right direction with the securing of online betting giants Betfair as the jersey sponsor. While the sums of money involved were far from lucrative, it was one of the clubʼs first sponsors from outside the Turkish community in many years, and the interest from such a recognisable name boded well. Typically though, there was a hitch – the BFV does not allow betting companies to appear on jerseys, and just as typically, Türkiyemspor found a way around the issue. A strip of masking tape over the ʻtʼ in ʻBetfairʼ and the Türkiyem jerseys were adorned with the slogan ʻBe fairʼ – a very Türkiyem solution to a very Türkiyem problem. Despite the setback, the sponsorship deal should continue if the menʼs team, as expected, manages to scrape together the finances to re-form in the Berlin-Liga for the 2012/2013 season. So what does the future have in store for Türkiyemspor? As illustrated by the continued excellent performances by the youth and womenʼs teams, Türkiyemspor is far from dead. But for the menʼs team to achieve on-field success, one canʼt help but feel that large-scale structural changes are necessary – here, professionalism and sustainability are the key words. The desire to assign blame for Türkiyemʼs downfall must be avoided, and firm, professional, non-emotional, financially aware leadership is required. Both St. Pauli and 1.FC Union have both shown in recent years that it is possible to remain loyal to the community the club represents while running it as a sound, financially-viable business. That those teams are currently in such a healthy financial state is due to that
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The Germans churn out ‘keepers like they do cars. From the very lowest level, there is always someone wanting to protect the goal. In England, the role is given to the unpopular, the none footed, the fat kid. Here, the skill is as treasured as much as any other in the beautiful game. It is respected. From the legends of Maier and Croy, through Illgner, Schumacher and Kahn, German goalkeepershave been a singular, and singularly successful breed. Unique and difficult at times, but that is to beexpected and is supremely tolerated. They know the goalkeeper is the most important position on the pitch. Let no one disavow you of that. A goalkeeper needs great vision, communication and determination. He needs to have the patience of a saint and the rubbery-hipped athleticism of a high-class whore. He has to have sloping shoulders so that a ton of abuse can slide easily off them and down onto the floor, where he stands imprisoned by those thin white lines that determine his entire life on the field. The collective noun for a group of goalkeepers is a worry, but you will rarely see them running with a pack. They work alone on the pitch, waiting for the moment when someone out front (and there is always someone) will have let their side down, leaving the smallest of gaps to open up at the back. The good goalkeeper will have seen the minutest of holes as a gaping chasm in his area already. He will have closed it down before his nemesis, the striker, even knew it was there. This striker, (if he is worthy of his title) with his hairband, his white boots and his gaggle of teenage followers waiting around his sports car at the end gets to indulge in the orgasmic explosion of the goal, that thrilling denouement, the sweaty backed, breathless, heavenly feeling that can make grown men cry and children terrified. The goalkeeper gets none of this. His job is to patrol the dormitory with a wooden ruler, always vigilant, in case someone gets the wrong idea. He is a monk noting down our shame for future reference. He plays the policeman to the strikers’ criminal. Someone, after all, has to take responsibility. The great goalkeepers are often called mad, but this should be seen as an affliction being born of necessity. If they aren’t a little detached, then they will have problems dealing with all the shit that will eventually fly their way. Nobody else on the pitch has to deal with the fact that one simple mistake will be remembered forever. Even the Titan himself, Oliver Kahn, once made a mistake on the biggest stage. In the 2002 World Cup final, Rivaldo fired a shot from about twenty-five towards the German goal. Kahn should always have been equal to it, and judging the dip and swerve of the ball as he composed himself, prepared to take what was a regulation mopping up. The ball, that bastard object with a twisted sense of humour, tricked him and squirmed out of his bear hug, falling at the feet of the beautiful thief, Ronaldo. 1-0. People forget all too easily that in that World Cup Germany shouldn’t have had a chance in the first place. They cheered him as a hero all the same as he returned home, but his wall of infallibility was damaged. His armour against the world and its strikers had developed a chink. It is no coincidence that not too long after Yokohama, Oliver Kahn was deputising for his former enemy Jens Lehmann, keeping the bench warm with magnanimity and good humour in a way that seemed so anathema to the great man. As Oliver Kahn’s glorious career ended, he allowed himself to prepare to rejoin the real world, he allowed himself the chance to be a human again. Ian Stenhouse has been watching the men in the sticks for us. He has waited, like they do, for the moment when they can be human again, and for the moments when they can’t allow this to happen. His photographs show the other side to the beautiful game. The men who stand where the sun doesn’t shine and, as Eduardo Galeano told us, under whose feet the grass never grows.
Images by Ian Stenhouse Text by Jacob Sweetman
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