»We drove back from Berlin and were transformed. We had become different people« (Berlin, May 19, 2018)
Bayern Munich, Dortmund, Bayern Munich and now Leipzig, these are the last four recent cup finals from a Frankfurt perspective. The first of these games took place in 2006. At that time, Eintracht Frankfurt had been an elevator team for years, they enjoyed climbing up, but the wit of total humiliation was always in the back of their minds – namely having to climb up at all because they had climbed down beforehand. 2006, that was the leaden time, associated with the name Friedhelm Funkel, although he was not unpopular with the more sensible fans. And Heribert Bruchhagen’s time as CEO, who was sometimes considered the great stabilizer, sometimes the standstill machine, and who enriched the Frankfurt football treasure trove of quotes with the stock exchange slogan “The flood lifts all boats”.
So my journey back then was hopeless, and I also had to come over from Rome by train. The day before yesterday someone told me it rained in this final, I don’t remember it. Under Funkel we had gotten used to dealing with defeats against big teams before the game, so to speak, and Eintracht then lost the game quite dryly. Back then, even in pre-commercial times, I thought it was nice that you could still buy a bottle of beer not far from the stadium for less than two marks. We left Berlin undamaged. Eintracht managed to stay in the Bundesliga for a long time, only to be relegated again.
Then came what was surely the most important game for a long time, on September 25, 2012 against Dortmund. For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Eintracht played something like football, beautiful football, even thrilling football, and were able to defy Dortmund (it ended 3-3) not just out of luck or through a fight, but through creative footballing power. The audience was over the moon. We all went home a little differently than usual. Should Eintracht Frankfurt no longer be a punching ball?
The club got stuck in this situation for a few years, although it never managed to move up into a better category, and Bruchhagen was now seen as the administrator of the standstill. Whether rightly or wrongly, I cannot judge. I once had a funny encounter with him on the return journey from Rostock in the ICE, exactly twenty years after the traumatic loss of the championship on the last day of the game in Rostock. He wasn’t even aware of the date. That date, with which every Frankfurter ran around in their hearts for the next 26 years, until the redemption on May 19, 2018, but more on that in a moment.
I’ve been living in Frankfurt for a long time now and rode my bike to the stadium for a quarter of an hour. The year 2017 was approaching, the next cup final since the dreary Bayern game. In the pre-season we had managed to come close to the dangerous descent again. We didn’t have any hopes against Dortmund in the cup final, so we weren’t in such a bad mood either, because we still had the sparkle function mechanism in us: You digest games like that before you lose. Nevertheless, the opportunity was clearly there. In the last 20 minutes of the first half we played Dortmund against the wall. We were a little euphoric in the audience. Then came the famous half-time break, during which the DFB let Helene Fischer appear. She was whistled at so mercilessly that I still tease the person next to me that he left his seat during the break. Then it was lost again quite dry.
The following year… yeah… hm. In short, the following year, 2018, we beat Bayern Munich 3-1 in the cup final. I’ll skip the game, everything has been said about that, but I would like to describe our previous thoughts on why we went to Berlin in the first place. Because it was clear to all of us that we would lose this game with a thousand percent certainty, and that we would lose very dryly. We had plenty of time to discuss when, two weeks before the final at Frankfurt’s Waldstadion, we queued for hours in huge queues to get our ticket allocated. None of the people sitting next to me wanted to watch the game. Everyone knew it was going to be a horrible day, combined with an agonizing journey. But one argument killed everyone else: we imagined what it would be like not to go and then for some reason Eintracht wins the game, and then we would have to spend the rest of our lives with a psychiatrist trying to work out how it could have happened, that we didn’t go. So we drove, of course. With the well-known outcome that made everything, really everything, different than it had been a quarter of a century ago. Eintracht became cup winners. Eintracht then played internationally. And (!) with success. Eintracht became a pan-European icon thanks to their away fans (like it or not). Fantastic European Cup nights. Dream goals. More fans on the road than any other club before. Winning the European Cup at the second attempt after three years. Complete coping with the 26-year trauma that the region suffered from the game in Rostock, the date of which Heribert Bruchhagen apparently – in contrast to the Eintracht fans – at least did not have every minute in his head every day.
We drove back from Berlin and were transformed. We had become different people. We are different now.
Of course, with the effect that a lot of people now want to belong. It feels like half the city is now flying to the next European Cup location. It has become fashionable, it has a cult following, and people want to be part of it. I hardly know an eight or nine-year-old who hasn’t been to Barcelona or to the European Cup final win in Seville.
And so today I’m getting on the train with tens of thousands of other Frankfurters to go to Berlin, towards Leipzig. A lot of people around me are cheerful and delirious in sentences like “We can do finals”. I, on the other hand, would have preferred the club and environment to have conveyed that we are not going into this game as favorites at all. The role should definitely have been left to Leipzig.
At least one thing will remain: If we lose, that will also be different than it used to be. Because we ourselves have become different. The twinkle gene is gone, so losing might make you a lot more annoyed than it used to be. But the constant depression is gone, too. And it won’t come back in the same way either. For that we would have to lose another championship on the last day.
Because if there’s one thing we can do, it’s trauma.
