Club boss Younis Kamil tries to teach younger players at Al Hilal Bonn more than just football.
Photo: CSO Al Hilal Bonn
A visit to the south of Bonn, in the Pennenfeld district, where many people from immigrant families live in a small space. Industrial facilities, apartment blocks, a popular youth center, and an artificial turf pitch in between. The football teams of the International Sports Club Al Hilal Bonn train here. Youth players talk to Younis Kamil on the sidelines. The first chairman of the association believes that one term is crucial: communication.
Al Hilal means “the crescent moon”. It is the name of several clubs, especially in the Arab world. Almost all of the Bonn club’s players have parents or grandparents who immigrated or fled to Germany – from Turkey, Syria, Iraq or the Palestinian territories. These are countries in which people sometimes look negatively or even hostilely towards Israel. “Our members are shocked and horrified,” says Younis Kamil about Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel. “There is not a single voice in the club that glorifies or approves of this.”
It seems important to Younis Kamil to emphasize this point right at the beginning of the conversation. On this basis, he then explains the consequences of terror and escalation in the Middle East for sport and migrant clubs such as ISC Al Hilal Bonn. “There is a great feeling of powerlessness,” he says. “Many of our members feel not understood and marginalized.” He refers to a quote from Friedrich Merz on X, formerly Twitter. “If there are refugees from Gaza, then they are initially an issue for the neighboring states,” said the chairman of the CDU parliamentary group. »Germany cannot accept any more refugees. We have enough anti-Semitic young men in the country. In doing so, Merz portrayed anti-Semitism exclusively as an “import” from Muslim migrants, says Kamil. “Racist connotations like these contribute to social polarization.”
Members of the ISC Al Hilal Bonn were confronted with blanket accusations even before the Hamas attack. “Always the same with you migrants.” Kamil hears this sentence again and again when one of his players gets too hard into a duel. And a referee once told him: “If I see on the match sheet that more than half of all players are foreigners, then I’ll pull the yellow card at the first action as a deterrent.” Words like these suggest that referees are the players of Al Hilal can sometimes be punished more harshly than those of clubs with a German-sounding name.
Younis Kamil, who came to Germany from Sudan with his parents in 1991 as a toddler, has been scientifically studying the radicalization of young people for three years. “Frequent experiences of exclusion can lead,” he says, “to adolescents constantly suspecting injustice in their everyday lives and their identification with the state dwindling.” An attitude that is exemplified in many families because the parents are looking for a job or encounter resistance in an apartment. Around 80 percent of the children and young people at Al Hilal come from families that rely on social benefits.
In the current charged discussion about the Middle East, frustration and feelings of helplessness are particularly widespread at Al Hilal Bonn. Kamil recommends that his members greatly reduce their consumption of social media. In conversations with his players, he puts it this way: “Never glorify violence. If you want to express yourself, only do so constructively. You shouldn’t confirm the images that others want to see of you.”
The members of Al Hilal have received several integration awards for their commitment. They are more likely to sense reservations in their own environment. It rarely happens that local clubs and sports associations ask for their expertise. The question that Kamil often hears in Bonn, on the other hand, is: “Why do you keep to yourself and don’t integrate into a real club?” He could respond with counter questions: Why do senior citizens, firefighters or stamp collectors join together to form leisure teams? Because they are already connected to each other through their age, their job, their hobby. And because they want to deepen this familiarity in football. There is an additional political and historical layer to the estimated 1,000 migrant sports clubs in Germany: they were an important platform for millions of guest workers as early as the 1970s. Here they were able to make friends and make contacts for jobs and apartments.
Younis Kamil still sees clubs like his International Sports Club Al Hilal Bonn as a “safe space”. Here, in the “safe space,” members can assume knowledge and sensitivity. Here they can describe their experiences of discrimination – without being scrutinized, interrupted or patronized. It is a form of self-empowerment, which some association officials interpret as a lack of willingness to integrate. There are migrant clubs that want to protect themselves from these prejudices and therefore adopt a German-sounding name: In Berlin, for example, Galatasaray became Rixdorfer SV and Samsunspor became FC Kreuzberg; in Stuttgart, TSV Hilalspor renamed itself FC Stuttgart-Cannstatt.
At Al Hilal, they have also considered a name change, also in the hope of making it easier to find sponsors and members without an immigrant background. They decided against it, says Kamil: “We live in an immigration society, and we don’t want to have to hide the symbolic reference to our origins.” In order to create opportunities, Kamil makes it clear to young footballers early on that a professional career is unlikely. He emphasizes education and looks at his players’ credentials. Anyone who has problems at school can receive tutoring in the club environment and take less time in training.
Around 25 percent of the German population has a history of immigration. Among those volunteering in football clubs, it is only 8.8 percent, and among the 372 members of the highest DFB committees it is only 3.5 percent. A quarter of the population is not even remotely represented in football. Kamil, who is doing his doctorate in sports sociology at the University of Brussels, is involved in a project run by the Turkish Community of Germany and the German Olympic Sports Confederation. The goal: Research causes and formulate recommendations in order to reflect more diversity at decision-making levels in sport.
In view of the current discussion, the project appears more important than ever. If the situation in the Middle East continues to deteriorate, the consequences will also be felt in German amateur football – for the Jewish clubs in Maccabi and for migrant clubs such as ISC Al Hilal.
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