Top Six Tips for German Soccer Viewing: What I Learned in Dortmund
Soccer is taken more seriously than politics in Germany. Be prepared for anything.
It happened. I feel just a bit more German now. I definitely feel different. Yes, I went to my first true German outdoor soccer viewing party. On Saturday night two of Germany’s best teams, Borussia Dormund and Bayern Munich, played for Germany’s national cup and well….Dortmund pretty much kicked Bayern’s butt (5-2). And it’s not every day that Bayern has their butt kicked. As anyone who has lived in Germany or is German knows, soccer is a religion here and wow….Germans REALLY take their soccer seriously. So, when my friend Katrin invited me out for a viewing of the game in Dortmund on Saturday I was more than excited to join the viewing and see what it was all about. The game was actually held in Berlin but that didn’t matter…Dortmund was alive with soccer vibes, especially since they just came off a huge win, taking the title of Budesliga Champions (that’s a big deal here in Germany!) So, here’s what I learned about watching big games on the big screen with crazy German soccer fans.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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So there you go: the last match day of the 2010-2011 season has been played, and the 18 Bundesliga teams is divided into two camps – the winners and the losers. Nevertheless, deciding which teams belong to which category is a matter of personal interpretation – and here’s mine.
For my money, the biggest disappointment is Eintracht Frankfurt. You name it, they’ve done it wrong, and so they deserve what is looking likely to be the fourth relegation in club history. I mean, just look at them: the worst second leg to a season ever and a disastrous attempt at something approaching football against Cologne this weekend – which, needless to say, ended with them losing 0:2.
So Borussia Dortmund is now the Bundesliga champion 2010-2011. Despite there being another two match days this season, BVB’s 2:0 win against Nuremberg on the weekend put them beyond the reach of their closest rivals, Leverkusen, who lost 0:2 to Cologne. Even if the Leverkusen boys had won, though, their chances of claiming this title this season would have stayed slim.
Professional footballers have a lot in common with children – well, at least the FC Bayern boys do in any case. On the one hand, they’re unpredictable, moody, and have real difficulty concentrating on one thing for 90 minutes, as shown by their poor 1:1 performance against a much weaker Nuremberg side last week. Then again, just like children, they can be fresh, creative and full of innocent pleasure, which is what the Bayern team was like yesterday as they stormed to a 5:1 win over Bayer Leverkusen.
The 29th match day of this Bundesliga season was a day of big-name duels. There was Frankfurt-Bremen, Stuttgart-Kaiserslautern and Mönchengladbach-Cologne, all of which were fights between relegation candidates – the latter, of course, was also something of a local Rhineland derby.
Christoph Daum’s return to Bundesliga football has grabbed the headlines and suddenly, the full heat of the media microscope is bearing down on him and his new employers, Eintracht Frankfurt.