Psuddenly everything was new. The teammates. The crest. The hate. Robert Klauss suspected that the first day of the 2009/10 season would be anything but a normal start. He sat in the small, stuffy cabin in Jena and wondered how his quiet life could have been thrown into such turmoil. Three years earlier he had moved to Leipzig from Straußberg in Brandenburg to study.
He improved the cash register with football. Klauss was a decent center forward in the amateur field, and even then there were several hundred euros to be made in the Oberliga. In Markranstädt, a satellite town of Leipzig, he found what he was looking for: solid mediocrity, no great ambitions.
That changed in the summer of 2009. The Austrian-based beverage company Red Bull pushed its way into German football with vehemence. They looked for a loophole and found it in Leipzig. More precisely in Markranstädt. The company was shown the door in Düsseldorf, St. Pauli or Munich, but the situation was different in and around Leipzig. The big city craved professional football, just like the entire east of Germany.
skepticism when entering
The territory of the former GDR had degenerated into a sporting diaspora, the big clubs Dynamo Dresden, Carl Zeiss Jena and 1. FC Magdeburg had never found their way in the new system after the political change. Just like the Leipzig chemical and locomotive representatives. Red Bull knew about the potential, but needed a trick to get started. From SSV Markranstädt, the company took over the right to start in the fifth-class Oberliga for its newly founded football construct Rasenballsport Leipzig. That was better than having to start in the fourteenth league, as the statutes would have otherwise provided.
The entry was met with skepticism. In Austria, Red Bull had already given the traditionalists the finger and turned the traditional club Austria Salzburg into a kicking advertising brochure in which nothing was left of the original club: new name, new crest, new colors. In Germany, the intentions caused horror among those who clung to the romanticized football of the 1960s and 1970s. Leipzig shouldn’t become a club, but a business model.
In 2009, RB Leipzig started in the fifth division. In May 2014 the club was promoted to the second Bundesliga.
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Image: dpa
From the moment he got off the bus in Jena, Robert Klauss felt how hatred becomes noticeable in football. Distorted faces everywhere, eyes expressing anger and incomprehension, insults. On that day in September, it wasn’t even against the first team of Carl Zeiss, the three-time East German champions, but against the reserves. On a side square of the Ernst-Abbe-Sportfeld, the spectators mobbed and spat in the direction of Leipzig, the mood was aggressively charged.
People were driven by envy. In their opinion, Carl Zeiss was struggling in vain in a sick system, while the newcomer just got the millions in the group. They thought the same way in Dresden, Magdeburg and Rostock. Jena was the start of a long gauntlet run. “It went so far that we ran onto the bus without changing clothes and without a shower,” says Klauss.
