It’s football, but without the oligarchs

The rule that has kept German football distinctive is the 50% plus one, which requires a majority stake to be held by ordinary club members. This has helped keep them rooted in their communities and ticket prices low. 

It started to fray at the edges when corporations such as Red Bull snapped up an amateur club and turned it into RB Leipzig. Bayer, the chemicals giant, all but owns Leverkusen and Volkswagen does the same in Wolfsburg, but complicated arrangements have ensured that the principle has not been broken. 

The story of Union Berlin starts in 1966, or rather it might do, depending on your starting point. Since 1906, under a series of different names, it has moved from one part of the city to another and from one name to another. But 1966 is the year that’s been chosen – it was when the Communist GDR reconstituted its league – and January of this year marked the 60^th anniversary of the club they call “Iron Berlin”.

The story goes that this was the “people’s club”, as distinct from Dynamo Berlin which was the Stasi club. It was said that Union fans used to chant “The wall must go!” when opposing teams lined up to defend against a free kick. 

Did it really happen? “That’s a bit of a romanticisation,” says Christoph Biermann, my guide for my first outing at the Stadion An der Alten Försterei (the old forester’s lodge). Biermann is one of Germany’s top football journalists and author of a book, We’ll Live Forever, for which he spent a year behind the scenes at the club.

The trouble with Union is that for most of their existence they haven’t been very good. A bit like Gordon Brown supporting Raith Rovers, it adds to street cred but has seldom brought glamour. Post-unification in 1990, all the clubs from the East struggled; many have remained in the lower reaches ever since. 

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Union spent the best part of two decades trying to stay alive. That’s where the second half of the legend kicks in. In 2008, the club was told it would lose its licence, as its terraces were literally crumbling. Supporters gave whatever they could, including donating their own blood to bring in cash to prop up their own stadium. It is said that 2,500 fans put in 140,000 hours of work between them to do plastering and painting. 

The club was reprieved and made it up to the Second Division, and in the last half dozen years it’s been ever upwards. In 2019, it won promotion to the Bundesliga and in the 2023/24 it made it to the giddy heights of the Champions League.

This season it’s no longer in Europe and struggling in the top ranks. By the time I made it for my first game (in a ground that holds 22,000, tickets are like gold dust), Union had slipped into the lower half of the table. They hadn’t won for two months, and they were playing Leverkusen, who were four places ahead of them in sixth. The visitors have dominated this fixture, losing just once in the teams’ 16 previous meetings. The omens were hardly propitious. 

Not that you would have noticed from the crowd. Long before the players took the field, the three sides of the ground that are standing-only were bouncing as the favourite chants blared out. Then on the loudspeaker came Nina Hagen, the godmother of German punk, singing the club’s anthem “Iron Union”, a eulogy to all things Berlin, which she recorded in 1998. The lyrics range from “tough times, tough team”, to “wonderful and always green” to – everyone’s favourite line – “we’ll never be bought out by the West”.

Unlike Dynamo, which has gone from Stasi to Nazi, as it’s claimed, Union doesn’t fall into the stereotype of the East German, AfD-supporting far-right. For all the hard talk on the terraces, the emphasis is on tolerance, community and families – this was the first club to hold a Christmas sing-along on the terraces one Sunday each December. Others have since copied them.

The match started true to form, Leverkusen laying siege to Union’s goal. It was nail-biting long-ball stuff, not for the purists, but for 90 minutes, plus every second of added time, the crowd didn’t stop singing or bouncing. In the 27^th minute, the home side scored when Rani Khedira, a German-born Tunisian midfielder, slotted in a loose ball following a defensive error. It came out of the blue, or Biermann puts it, aus der kalten Hose, out of cold trousers. The decibel level grows ever higher.

At half time, there was no entertainment and no adverts were played on the screen; instead, the announcer mentioned any member who’s passed away since the previous game. Fans head off instead to the various stalls for beer and sausages. 

Biermann (who’s been to most top-flight English grounds) and I talked Chelsea. I recalled that in the mid-2000s I was invited onto its Media Advisory Committee, where together with tabloid editors and even a Formula 1 star we talked public relations before watching the game with champagne and canapés from the directors’ suite – which was then called the Armani Lounge. It’s not quite the same here, he mused. 

So, to the second half, in which the home team, to coin a phrase of a former Chelsea manager, Jose Mourinho, parked the bus. It’s not pretty, but against the odds, Union held out. At the final whistle, Biermann took me down to the press room, where the managers and various players do their TV slots. 

We talked to Christopher Trimmel, club legend, club captain, who is not surrounded by PRs or minders; he asked me where I’m heading next. I told him I’m going out for a drink with a mate in another part of town, in Friedrichshain, at which point we discussed the best Tube line to get there. Even if he has one, there was no talk of Ferraris.

I told him it was my first time at Union. He joked that I’d brought them luck and should take over as club mascot. “Come again,” he said. I will, or at least I hope to, on Easter Saturday when Union takes on another of the “cult clubs”, Hamburg’s St Pauli, known for its Leftist history. Now that I have my membership card (it cost all of €20) I’ll be there. And the tickets are cheap. Which reminds me: I haven’t been to Stamford Bridge for a while.

John Kampfner’s new book, Braver New World, is published on 16 April by Atlantic