The place where Wolfgang Overath ruled with the omnipotence of a Roman emperor is now a construction site. The remnants of his dominions were torn out, rolled up and cleared away. Although it is only yellowed wood and an old artificial turf, the rubbish still has archaeological value, because Overath used this property for decades to conduct his football round every Thursday evening at seven. Last September, 1. FC Köln had to evict the team of their world champion and ex-president, and Overath, who will soon be celebrating his 80th birthday, moved a few kilometers with his comrades to a soccer field in the municipality of Hürth.
Luckily for him, Overath was incurably football-obsessed and was not only the boss at Thursday’s kick-off at Geißbockheim, who was always right, but also the man who put the teams together and interpreted the rules and overtime – in his favor, of course. “We mostly played until we won,” says Stephan Engels, permanent member of the Round Table and Overath’s leading adjutant: “Malicious gossips claim that sometimes the lights were on until eleven o’clock at night.”
The big question now, however, is how long the lights in Geißbockheim will burn in the future. The whereabouts of 1. FC Köln in the legendary clubhouse is in question, the club needs more space for its claims than the property and the real estate have to offer. The old internationals Overath and Engels and their squad are the first to have had to give way to the club’s urge to expand. The FC is currently creating space for a modern athletics and fitness studio in their hall. In the ensemble with the construction of two new football pitches on the southern edge of the site, more than three million euros are invested – and yet it is just another improvisation to temporarily make life easier in cramped conditions.
According to local newspaper reports, 1. FC Köln’s medium to long-term path will lead to a location on the western outskirts of the city. This place is called Marsdorf and not for nothing like a distant planet. There, the city offers the club a site on which men’s, women’s and youth teams find enough space under modern professional conditions. In the long run, the old location will become too cramped without expansion in the immediate vicinity, the protected green belt landscape park. Among other things, the political mood in the town hall prevents it from spreading on the doorstep. The club management has rejected the possible compromise solution, a spatial separation between the youth and professional departments. That was “discussed up and down,” they say. Result: no. For the young people, visual contact with the professionals is “significantly important in order to have their goal in mind”.
There is a tendency to move at 1. FC Köln
Officials of the club thus confirm the tendency to move out and add an appropriate regretful sigh, because this much is of course clear to everyone: “The soul of FC is reflected in Geißbockheim.”
In Cologne, however, improvisations have a chance of eternal life. For example, in 1996 a hall was built on a square next to the main train station that looks like a large camping tent, almost unforgivable in terms of urban development. But it was only supposed to function as a “temporary venue” for a few months. A real Cologne joke: 27 years later, the structure is called the “Musical Dome” and still spoils the panorama on the left bank of the Rhine in the vicinity of the cathedral.
Open detailed view
In 2012 the Cologne coach was called Stale Solbakken and the fans were once again afraid of relegation – but everyone still felt comfortable at Geißbockheim.
(Photo: Federico Gambarini/dpa)
Stephan Engels comes up with a different story on this Cologne topic. When he drove with his father from Mondorf on the right bank of the Rhine to Geißbockheim in 1978 to sign the first professional contract with FC manager Karl-Heinz Thielen, he stood in his car for hours behind a railway barrier at the nearby military ring road. No problem, Thielen said afterwards to Engels senior and junior, “at some point we’ll have an underpass here,” and then the walk would be a quarter of an hour shorter. “But,” added Thielen, “Franz Kremer told me that when I came from Rodenkirchen.”
Thielen came to FC from the Rodenkirchen district in the south in 1959, and Franz Kremer was the president at the time, who founded 1. FC Köln after the Second World War and led it to a modern football era that not only left the German football competition far behind . Football officials from home and abroad traveled to Cologne to visit the Geißbockheim clubhouse, which was inaugurated in 1953. It ranked among the avant-garde. From Overath’s memories of the early Bundesliga years: “The others still changed in the garage, we already had the Geißbockheim.”
The club house, including extensions and extensions in the countryside, is not only the center of life for the FC, it is also a spiritual place. There, behind every thick tree, one encounters the spirit of Konrad Adenauer (whom he had planted a hundred years ago as mayor of Cologne) and his Rhenish post-war republic, and one feels the bourgeois origins and history of FC and the legacy of the principled ancestor Franz Kremer, who gave the club its name neighboring stadium where the regional league team and the women play in the first division. The latter, everyone agrees, urgently need better accommodation than before.
The real special feature of the property is its heavenly location. Millions and millions of people have directed their walks, excursions, dog walks, rendezvous and babysitting here to watch training or just to be close to the FC. It is a Cologne pilgrimage destination, worldly urge for distraction mixed with higher motives. Stephan Engels, a FC professional for twelve years and later a coach for a long time, describes the place as an almost sacred site: “It was always authentic, to feel, smell, touch, an atmosphere that I’ve always enjoyed.”
Unlike most of his colleagues in the league, FC head coach Steffen Baumgart doesn’t mind if he trains in front of Geißbockheim and people watch him at work. On the other hand, he fought against the early modern conditions in the clubhouse from the start, and he himself helped with the conversion of the cabins last year. But will the coach still be there when the big hit comes in Marsdorf? If you look at the usual pace of realization of construction projects in Cologne, it would be better for him to be able to attend the inauguration as a guest of honor during his lifetime.
