The signs were clear: the hordes of joggers on the streets, the sold out racing bikes in the shops, you could see it coming. Everyone runs and kicks on their own, and the rest, it seems, got a dog during the pandemic. Sure, the weaker self will not be fed, and yet the force of the number is surprising: German sport lost almost 800,000 members in the Corona year 2020, and the decline will continue, Alfons Hörmann, the president, reckons of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB). It is a “severe setback” for Sport Germany. That is formulated in a surprisingly harmless way.
Because if popular sport suffers, it is not just a problem for top sport and the gold hopes of tomorrow. But a pain point of the present. The associations promoted organized sport during the pandemic as the “cement of society”, as a “social gas station”. Now you have to hold on: the glue will come off. The fuel is running out.
The sports associations were often not at the negotiating table of politics
School sport was brutally canceled, the children were canceled from gymnastics, and now a whole generation threatens to be lost to the sport. According to the club count, up to a quarter of those under six are absent, the youngest stay away. The consequences can already be felt. Swimming coaches complain that they have to teach the children to walk again after the lockdown, a seahorse badge is out of the question. Germany is turning from a people of poets, thinkers and clubmen into a country of non-swimmers.
It’s not as if the associations didn’t sound the alarm. The only difference is that they have hardly found a hearing in politics, often they are not even seated at the table during the negotiations, after which the hardware stores were opened and the sports fields were closed. If the sport made it onto the agenda, it was mostly a matter of ventilating the multi-million dollar business of professional football. And now? Football is buzzing again, and the youth teams are also still popular. But in the shadow of King Football it gets dark: the major clubs in the metropolitan areas are in dire straits, ten percent of their members have turned their backs on them, and there is a lack of volunteers who support the system.
The sports clubs have the strength to bring back together what the pandemic tore apart. Because on the tennis courts and in the gyms, anti-vaccination campaigners and supporters applaud each other (don’t forget to wash your hands!), And everyone is equal in front of the soccer goals on the soccer field. A divided society should therefore not be indifferent when its sports clubs suffer.
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