opinion
Champions League
Longing stings tradition – or why my football heart beats for RB Leipzig
After 20 years of football drought, the football fans in Leipzig are back in the mood for humid and happy evenings under floodlights.
© Martin Rose / Bongarts / Getty Images
RB Leipzig is in the semi-finals of the Champions League. For our author, a moderately gifted football player with Saxon roots, a holiday. There is exactly one reason why his heart beats for the Red Bulls.
When the young Tyler Adams in the almost deserted Estádio José Alvalade in Lisbon puts the ball into the mesh to make it 2-1 for RB Leipzig, I sit on the terrace of our allotment garden. I invited two friends and we chat about this and that over beer and chips. When planning the evening, I somehow got through that the RB-Kicker would play the quarter-finals of the Champions League against Atletico Madrid that day. Instead of watching the most important game in club history on the sofa at home and cheering on my cops, I have to be content with the live ticker on my smartphone. No matter. It worked. And I still have at least one chance.
Now some people are probably wondering what exactly went wrong with me. Or to put it another way: Why all over the world I am a fan of RB Leipzig. The annoying “Brause” club, which was founded only eleven years ago, has been stirring up the Bundesliga for five years and polarized like no other of the 18 clubs. Well, in order to be able to understand my sympathy for the grass ballers, I have to go a little further.
The Müller moment for eternity
It is the evening of April 14, 1987. Central Stadium Leipzig. Drizzle. Semi-finals in the European Cup Winners’ Cup. With a 1-0 win in the first leg, Lokomotive Leipzig can make it into the final against Girondins Bordeaux in front of an officially 73,000 spectators. I was eight years old at the time and my father was one of probably more than 100,000 witnesses to this memorable football game. On the sofa at home, I cheer for the blue-yellows – for more than 120 minutes. Lag after just 170 seconds; a missed penalty in overtime. What a drama. And my eyes still light up when I think about it and tell in complete euphoria how Lok goalkeeper René Müller hit the decisive ball with his right foot in the top left corner of the penalty shoot-out. “I’ve never shot a penalty and just hit it,” commented Müller succinctly on his winning goal.
Only a few years later I ran onto the pitch – very proud of course – even in the “Loksche” jersey. My mother always dreamed of seeing her son live on TV as a footballer. I’m sorry mom. Should not be. In the B youth it was the end of the line. Despite everything, I never completely lost sight of football in my city – the city that had the first German champions at VfB Leipzig almost 120 years ago. No move to the north of football, no embarrassing bankruptcy, no descent into the lowlands of amateur football have changed that. Chemie Leipzig, Lok Leipzig, VfB Leipzig, RB Leipzig – neither the colors nor the logo on the jersey play a role for me. Tradition? Who determines what it is? I am a Leipzig and football fan with heart and soul. Finished.
20 years of football doldrums: longing struck tradition
But back to RB. What have the Red Bulls fans not had to listen to since their promotion to the 1st Bundesliga. What posters with unspeakably stupid slogans read in large stadiums of so-called traditional clubs. But what left the Leipzig football fans, including me, angry and perplexed at first, most of them now only wrestle a tired smile. They suffered for more than 20 years and waited longingly to see the big Bavarians or BVB play in Leipzig again. In your city. The founding place of the German Football Association. For two decades, they and an entire sports-loving region had to watch the most beautiful minor matter in the world being trampled on and sidelined. VfB Leipzig said goodbye to the 1st Bundesliga in the summer of 1994 after just one year. After that, football tore itself to pieces in the trade fair city. Dietrich Mateschitz, the billionaire co-owner of Red Bull, must have sensed that this cannot continue. Of course not without also thinking of his lucrative business with the bull shower. And if so.
Soccer Leipzig is back (where it belongs)
Patron Mateschitz kissed the soccer fans in Leipzig with his millions awake. In addition to Bayern, Borussia Dortmund and Gladbach, top international clubs such as Tottenham Hotspurs and Olympique Lyon are now playing again on the Pleiße. Incidentally, exactly where René Müller shot Lok Leipzig in the European Cup final in Athens in April 1987. That too is part of tradition for me. Almost 41,000 spectators came to each of RB Leipzig’s 17 home games in the past season. Fathers with their daughters and sons, families – and pensioners who, like me, can still remember the glittering nights in the stadium of the hundred thousand. The Champions League games were sold out. A competition that only the most daring optimists dared to dream of in Leipzig five years ago.
For the second leg of the second leg against Tottenham Hotspurs, I drove to Leipzig from my adopted home Hamburg with a shirt and a scarf in my luggage. Timo Werner and his teammates sent José Mourinho’s Spurs back to the island 3-0. And I, who had been shaking on the sofa 33 years earlier, more than just a tear of joy rolled down my cheeks that evening – and I was definitely not the only one in football-mad Saxony.
Soccer Leipzig is back – and could be on Tuesday (live from 7.30 p.m., Sky), 33 years after the 0-1 defeat in the European Cup final against Ajax Amsterdam in Athens, make it into the final of the most important competition in European club football for the first time.
Mateschitz millions invested wisely
No, you don’t have to like RB Leipzig. But demonizing the fans because they stand behind a team that football Germany has been enriching for a few years with its courageous, attractive and successful attacking football is not acceptable. Yes, Mateschitz transferred a few hundred million to Leipzig. But the money alone did not lift RB to the semi-finals of the Champions League. In contrast to many other (traditional) associations supported by daring, wealthy entrepreneurs – not only in Germany – the Saxons used the checks wisely instead of burning them haphazardly. That may be a thorn in the side of some football fans of yesterday and self-proclaimed saviors of German football culture. For Leipzig and the region, it was the best that could have happened after 25 sad years of football.
