Contents
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Page 1You have reached your goal
Page 2Not a sports club that was hijacked by a corporation for marketing purposes. Page 3Our cathedral is the Bayer Cross
On Sunday I smoked a cigarette in the center circle, hugged two dozen crying men I didn’t know, spilled a beer in the penalty area and, in the tumult on the stadium lawn, slung my scarf around Robert Andrich’s neck, which Leverkusen’s number 8, to my continued delight, was still wearing. when he later explained on television what this first championship that Bayer 04 Leverkusen had just won meant for him and the fans. He was a little at a loss for words, which is forgivable, but I still don’t have them today to describe the complete rush of happiness that was no longer thought possible that overwhelmed the Leverkusen stadium on Sunday evening: like the first day of spring after 22 years of winter. Like the first kiss after 22 years of unhappy love. Like the first championship of a football club, whose essence, since 2002 at the latest, since the title triple of Bundesliga, cup and Champions League was lost within a few days, has always been that it wastes away the big successes in the last few meters.
Even beyond any acute euphoria, it would always be appropriate to write a declaration of love for your hometown. But it takes this championship, which was believed to be impossible, and the nationwide relief that the eternal Bayern-Munich beer shower has been briefly stopped for someone to want to read it: a declaration of love for Leverkusen. To this strange city and its equally strange football club. So that’s why now. And by the way, I can also tell the story of my great-grandfather, without whom we probably wouldn’t have experienced Sunday evening, at least not me.
Remarkably, Sunday evening was my second pitch storm at this location. The first: May 16, 1992. I was 13 and hadn’t been particularly interested in football until then, but then Fred, who was sitting next to me in seventh grade, said we should go there, the stadium, the last match day of the Bundesliga, he I think I had free tickets. So we stood in the stands and timidly cheered on the Leverkusen team, who were rather mediocre at the time – then we saw Guido Buchwald score the decisive 2-1 in the 86th minute, unfortunately for Stuttgart, VfB became champions, in Leverkusen. Until last Sunday it was probably the last time here in a fully occupied stadium We Are the Champions was played. We had lost, but as we walked down to the pitch, the whole concept of football suddenly made sense to me. And looking back, there probably couldn’t have been a better initiatory moment for the following 32 years than this: standing right next to them when others have something to celebrate.
This article comes from ZEIT No. 17/2024. You can read the entire issue here from 5 p.m.
Four lost finals, five times runners-up in the Bundesliga, Ballack’s own goal in Unterhaching 2000, empty faces, hanging heads, you’ve read about it in detail in the last few weeks. However, love for a club grows stronger in defeat than in victory.
After community service and shortly before Ballack’s own goal, I moved away from Leverkusen. I grew up there and went to the Bayer (they actually say “the Bayer” here) stadium as a matter of course; When I was abroad, it took me a while until I understood the complete consternation of other football fans when asked this question: “What – are you a fan of theirs?” Yeah, sure, I, uh… why?
It only gradually became clear to me how bizarre the country’s traditional 1. FC Borussia Eintracht Munich’s honest love for the Bavarian must have seemed from the outside to me: provincial club. Commercial club. The hateful end of a real football tradition because of his connection to a chemical company. Because from the inside, from the city, the Bavarians were simply our club. We came from there. And connections to the company? The entire city of Leverkusen is a single connection to the Bayer Group.
More on the subject:
Bayer Leverkusen: “This is magic”
Let’s take my family as an example. As a language teacher in the 1970s, my father prepared Bayer managers for their foreign assignments with French. His brother: played the cello with the Bayer Philharmonic for decades. My other uncle: German youth champion over 200 meters as a Bayer track and field athlete in 1979. We went to the swimming pool, which was heated with waste heat from the factory, and saw theater in the Bayer recreation center; Our neighbor, like thousands of others, rode his red Bayer factory bike to work every day, and at school we could rely on new faces regularly appearing after the summer holidays: children whose fathers had just moved abroad after a few years as Bayer managers Leverkusen had returned. A popular holiday job back then: counting aphids in Bayer’s plant protection department.
On Sunday I smoked a cigarette in the center circle, hugged two dozen crying men I didn’t know, spilled a beer in the penalty area and, in the tumult on the stadium lawn, slung my scarf around Robert Andrich’s neck, which Leverkusen’s number 8, to my continued delight, was still wearing. when he later explained on television what this first championship that Bayer 04 Leverkusen had just won meant for him and the fans. He was a little at a loss for words, which is forgivable, but I still don’t have them today to describe the complete rush of happiness that was no longer thought possible that overwhelmed the Leverkusen stadium on Sunday evening: like the first day of spring after 22 years of winter. Like the first kiss after 22 years of unhappy love. Like the first championship of a football club, whose essence, since 2002 at the latest, since the title triple of Bundesliga, cup and Champions League was lost within a few days, has always been that it wastes away the big successes in the last few meters.
