Poor sportsmanship

German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich wants soccer fans to adopt a code of honor. The six-million-person strong German Football Association (DFB) plans to hold a symposium in order to achieve this goal. Police and fans, whose behavior the event is about, are expected to participate. The interior ministry and representatives of the football association agreed to this plan on Monday.

Dialogue with fans is supposed to be the main priority, according to Friedrich. Violent fans also should be invited to the symposium "in order to bring them over to the side of the peaceful fans." Friedrich has demanded that the peaceful fans demonstrate civic courage in the face of those who are violent.

Fan projects, financed by the football association and German state, have played a central role in the campaign against violence. DFB President Theo Zwanziger calls the 50 such projects across the nation "social work for society."

He cites the 80,000 football games that take place in Germany every weekend. More than 99 percent of the participants conduct themselves peacefully. Soccer enthusiasts cannot let the sport be tarnished by those who cultivate a violent fan culture, according to Zwanziger.

Trivializing violence

That begins with language, the DFB chief continued. For example, fanatical fans of the club Schalke 04 expressed their fury over goalie Manuel Neuer's switch to Bayern Munich with protest signs that were reminiscent of an obituary.

"If you trivialize verbal violence, then you have very quickly relativized the border to bodily harm," Zwanziger said.

And Germany's most powerful soccer official agrees with the associations and clubs that the concerns of the highly diverse fan scene have to be taken into account. Fans must have the feeling that they are being treated fairly, according to Michael Gabriel from the Fan Project Coordination Center (KOS).

"Only when they are treated fairly will they be willing to stand up to bad behavior within their own scene," Gabriel said.

Reinhard Rauball, president of the club Borussia Dortmund, leaves no doubt that the hardcore fans should not expect any sort of compromise on one point in particular: setting off pyrotechnics.

"I have a problem with fans classifying setting off pyrotechnics as a part the sport's tradition," said Rauball, a lawyer and president of the German Football League (DFL). It is contradictory to claim that an illegal act some how belongs to tradition, he continued.

Rauball has still managed to win a bit of sympathy within the fan scene because he opposes stricter stadium bans as well as the abolition of standing seats. Getting rid of standing seats would hurt his own club, because the almost always sold out stadium in Dortmund is infamous for its "yellow wall." That's where thousands of enthusiastic Borussia fans stand.

Author: Marcel Fürstenau / slk
Editor: Andreas Illmer