![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
As I've mentioned, I'm following two teams this year: Hertha because I ♥ Berlin, and Wolfsburg because I ♥ Arne Friedrich (who's out with an injury at the moment, which is sad. Thankfully the rest of the team is growing on me.)
Hertha's in the 2nd League after finishing dead last in the 2009/10 season (quite the upset after having finished 4th in the 2008/09 season!). 6 games in to this season, and they're at the top of the table. Yesterday they played Energie Cottbus in an "Ost-derby" (eastern derby). Energie is the 2nd in the 2nd league, and they've bounced in and out of the 1st league over the last 10 years.
[Aside: Cottbus is an interesting city, because it's home to the largest group of Sorbs in the country. It's almost on the border with Poland.]
In the previous matches, Hertha hasn't been challenged too much. They're still a 1st-league-class team (even if half the Kader left at the end of last season for greener 1st league pastures), and their opponents have been mostly 2nd-league-class teams. That's not to say they aren't good teams; the 2nd Bundesliga is still a professional league, but it's not the one the international/World Cup players are chosen from.
Yesterday's match vs Energie was anything but boring. Hertha couldn't dominate the field like they had in previous matches. There was amazing defending (and goal-keeping) on both ends of the pitch, and Hertha's single goal was at 59 minutes, off a long kick to a midfielder waiting to kick it in: it needed the right combination of skill and luck. There were a lot of close calls and near misses.
As of today, Energie deserves to be promoted to the 1st league. There are still 28 matches left in the season, and things can change, but I think this team deserves to be back in the 1st League. They've got the skill.
Energie is the only team from the former GDR to have ever played in the 1st League. Ever. Energie is the most successful team from the former GDR in the united Bundesliga. Dynamo Dresden and FC Hansa Rostock have also been in the 1st League, but neither team was in very long. There are still marked differences in the former East and the west: all the factories closed. They became redundant, for the most part, and many of them didn't meet the pollution standards of the west. It's a huge topic of debate in Germany right now: how do we keep the cities in the east from dying off because all the young people are going west where the jobs are?
Football is a very capitalist sport. Managers buy and sell players for heaps of money, and (in theory) the manager with the most money to buy the best players can put together the best team. (This is one reason I can never support FC Bayern. Yet Wolfsburg is the official team of Volkswagen... [No, really; the club began as the VW employees' gym/sport club in 1940-whatever. Wolfsburg and Bayer Leverkusen are the only teams excluded from the 50+1 rule, because they're grandfathered out. Pharmaceutical giant Bayer owns the football club Leverkusen.])
A whole 3 weeks ago, DW ran a story about the difficulty eastern clubs have in getting the money to get the good players. Sure, they can raise them up in the youth divisions, but there's no reason for a talented player to stay in the east, where they'll be stuck languishing in the second or third leagues, when they can move west to FC Bayern or Schalke 04 or Köln.
The transition at reunification was hard; harder on Ossis than Wessis (though decades later, with hindsight, a lot of the policies to ease the transition for the Ossis, like making 1 Ostmark equal 1 Deutsche Mark when the real exchange was more like 2 or 3:1, may have had negative consequences on the overall economy, but for someone living in Dresden in 1990, prices going up 3x without an equivalent increase in income would have been catastrophic. Those of you who would argue that it's A-OK to let people suffer because Government Intervention Is Always Wrong can kindly go fuck yourselves.)
In 1990/91, there were no private companies to make sponsorships in Leipzig or Aue or Cottbus, and, with the dissolution of the SED, there were no longer state subsidies. Twenty years later, there are still few private companies in the former east (the "new federal states," as they call them in Germany) with enough money to sponsor a football team with a payroll in the hundred-million Euro range, or to buy multiple contracts worth 30-40 million Euro each.
So the eastern teams live in the 2nd or 3rd leagues (or even in the amateur 4th and 5th/regional leagues), and they don't get the viewership that gets the kind of attention the Big League sponsors want, so they don't get the money they need to buy better players. It's a vicious cycle.
(FC Bayern has a big sponsorship from Deutsche Telekom; Schalke from Gazprom. Here is a list of all the sponsors from 2007/08 and at present (2nd link German only; "Trikotsponsor" is the name blazoned on their shirts; "Ausrüster" is who provides the clothing.)
It's a problem, to be sure, and an outgrowth of the highly capitalistic sport culture. I don't have any solution to the problem, other than wait and see what happens with Red Bull Leipzig over the next 5 years. Fans are (rightly) concerned about the commercialization of fan culture. [It's the difference between, say ComicCon and Dragon*Con, or Anime Expo and Otakon.]
In the meantime, I'll root for Hertha and cross my fingers for Energie Cottbus to place second and be automatically promoted. (Third place in the 2nd league plays 3rd-last in the first league, and the winner takes a spot in the 1st league.)
Hertha's in the 2nd League after finishing dead last in the 2009/10 season (quite the upset after having finished 4th in the 2008/09 season!). 6 games in to this season, and they're at the top of the table. Yesterday they played Energie Cottbus in an "Ost-derby" (eastern derby). Energie is the 2nd in the 2nd league, and they've bounced in and out of the 1st league over the last 10 years.
[Aside: Cottbus is an interesting city, because it's home to the largest group of Sorbs in the country. It's almost on the border with Poland.]
In the previous matches, Hertha hasn't been challenged too much. They're still a 1st-league-class team (even if half the Kader left at the end of last season for greener 1st league pastures), and their opponents have been mostly 2nd-league-class teams. That's not to say they aren't good teams; the 2nd Bundesliga is still a professional league, but it's not the one the international/World Cup players are chosen from.
Yesterday's match vs Energie was anything but boring. Hertha couldn't dominate the field like they had in previous matches. There was amazing defending (and goal-keeping) on both ends of the pitch, and Hertha's single goal was at 59 minutes, off a long kick to a midfielder waiting to kick it in: it needed the right combination of skill and luck. There were a lot of close calls and near misses.
As of today, Energie deserves to be promoted to the 1st league. There are still 28 matches left in the season, and things can change, but I think this team deserves to be back in the 1st League. They've got the skill.
Football is a very capitalist sport. Managers buy and sell players for heaps of money, and (in theory) the manager with the most money to buy the best players can put together the best team. (This is one reason I can never support FC Bayern. Yet Wolfsburg is the official team of Volkswagen... [No, really; the club began as the VW employees' gym/sport club in 1940-whatever. Wolfsburg and Bayer Leverkusen are the only teams excluded from the 50+1 rule, because they're grandfathered out. Pharmaceutical giant Bayer owns the football club Leverkusen.])
A whole 3 weeks ago, DW ran a story about the difficulty eastern clubs have in getting the money to get the good players. Sure, they can raise them up in the youth divisions, but there's no reason for a talented player to stay in the east, where they'll be stuck languishing in the second or third leagues, when they can move west to FC Bayern or Schalke 04 or Köln.
The transition at reunification was hard; harder on Ossis than Wessis (though decades later, with hindsight, a lot of the policies to ease the transition for the Ossis, like making 1 Ostmark equal 1 Deutsche Mark when the real exchange was more like 2 or 3:1, may have had negative consequences on the overall economy, but for someone living in Dresden in 1990, prices going up 3x without an equivalent increase in income would have been catastrophic. Those of you who would argue that it's A-OK to let people suffer because Government Intervention Is Always Wrong can kindly go fuck yourselves.)
In 1990/91, there were no private companies to make sponsorships in Leipzig or Aue or Cottbus, and, with the dissolution of the SED, there were no longer state subsidies. Twenty years later, there are still few private companies in the former east (the "new federal states," as they call them in Germany) with enough money to sponsor a football team with a payroll in the hundred-million Euro range, or to buy multiple contracts worth 30-40 million Euro each.
So the eastern teams live in the 2nd or 3rd leagues (or even in the amateur 4th and 5th/regional leagues), and they don't get the viewership that gets the kind of attention the Big League sponsors want, so they don't get the money they need to buy better players. It's a vicious cycle.
(FC Bayern has a big sponsorship from Deutsche Telekom; Schalke from Gazprom. Here is a list of all the sponsors from 2007/08 and at present (2nd link German only; "Trikotsponsor" is the name blazoned on their shirts; "Ausrüster" is who provides the clothing.)
It's a problem, to be sure, and an outgrowth of the highly capitalistic sport culture. I don't have any solution to the problem, other than wait and see what happens with Red Bull Leipzig over the next 5 years. Fans are (rightly) concerned about the commercialization of fan culture. [It's the difference between, say ComicCon and Dragon*Con, or Anime Expo and Otakon.]
In the meantime, I'll root for Hertha and cross my fingers for Energie Cottbus to place second and be automatically promoted. (Third place in the 2nd league plays 3rd-last in the first league, and the winner takes a spot in the 1st league.)
