Dhe German football is experiencing a hot autumn. Not only among the pros, where players and coaches are constantly upset about the referee’s decisions, or where coaches are fired like Frank Kramer from FC Schalke 04 on Wednesday. In amateur football, too, all hell breaks loose every autumn.
More often than at any other time in a season, games are canceled due to disruptions, fights or discriminatory statements. The Tübingen criminologist Thaya Vester, who has been scientifically examining abandoned matches for years and advises the German Football Association (DFB), sees two main reasons for this: bad weather and sporting failure.
Influence of dirt and cold
On the one hand, it makes “a difference whether someone is fouled in the sunshine or falls in the wet mud,” says Vester. If you’re lying in the dirt, you’re more likely to get angry. On the other hand, the place in the table in autumn shows that your own sporting expectations before the season were possibly too high.
While teams can “talk about their failures” after the first games of the season, great frustration comes into play in the autumn. The second peak of game abandonment follows at the end of the season, when the leagues are about championship, promotion or relegation. “We see a wave movement,” says Vester.
Unlike the ups and downs of a season, the total number of game abandonments is now only going in one direction – up. In the past 2021/22 season, there were 911 game abandonments in German amateur football, more than ever, is the result of the situation report presented by the DFB on Wednesday.
In the years before the corona pandemic restricted game operations for two seasons, the number of game abandonments was between 667 and 685, around a quarter lower than last time.
Decreased frustration tolerance
However, because at the same time the number of incidents reported by referees (5582) in the 2021/22 season was below average, one conclusion suggests itself: If events do occur, they are more serious than in the past three or four years.
“There are more highly escalating conflicts than before Corona,” says Vester. Football is “a burning glass for the problems in society,” explains fan and violence researcher Gunter A. Pilz, professor emeritus at the University of Hanover. Pandemic, war, energy crisis and inflation make the Germans generally more irritable. According to Pilz, the gameplay is therefore only the trigger for bullying and fights on the pitch, but not the reason for the “quick freak out”.
role of the shortage of referees
The anger often goes so far that teams no longer listen to the referee and leave the field of their own accord after an incident and refuse to continue playing. Every seventh game abandoned last season came about in this way.
This is also due to the fact that there is a lack of referees, especially in the lower divisions, and those who step in are often not taken seriously by the teams. “Well-trained referees are part of preventing violence,” says criminologist Vester.
The DFB tries to contain violence and discrimination in football with many initiatives and projects. After all, the DFB Vice President Ronny Zimmermann, who is responsible for amateurs, was able to state on Wednesday that the rate of game abandonments is still in the per thousand range.
It is 0.075 percent, after 0.05 in previous years. That means: On average, every 1339th game was canceled in the past season.
Criminologist Thaya Vester recalled that professional football is partly responsible for what is happening on amateur pitches. “When certain coaches rant like hell, people look at it,” said the scientist and demanded: “The Bundesliga must live up to its role model function more clearly.”
