Bundesliga: So no champion! The wild story of the title fights in Germany

Well, that started well: the ball was flat, and that too! Referee Franz Behr had sweat on his forehead. His workday had been stressful enough; After all, he had already marked out the playing field on the Altona parade pasture so that it would not be crossed by the usual Sunday walkers. Then he walked around with the plate in his hand and collected entry, which took a while with almost 2,000 spectators. And now that it was finally about to start, the finalists for the German championship flatly refused to play with his ball. A new one was needed, and that was problematic on a public holiday – the sports shops were closed. After a 45 minute delay we could finally get started.

At Pentecost 1903 there wasn’t much of the fascination that emanates from the annual battle for the German football championship, which was decided a week ago for the 110th time and produced a completely new winner, Bayer Leverkusen, already the 30th. The beginning was not only difficult, but also difficult to believe. The premiere could hardly have been more antic, because in the final VfB Leipzig met a team that neither belonged to Germany nor had even played a final round game: DFC Prague. Although he was a member of the German Football Association (DFB), founded in 1900, he was actually part of the Habsburg Empire.

People didn’t take it too seriously back then and were happy about anyone who wanted to play – and after all the players were German students. Was one of them responsible for the never-solved prank of sending the semi-final opponent from Karlsruhe a fake telegram in the name of the DFB saying that they had canceled the game? In any case, that was the only way the Prague team got to the final, which they lost 7-2 – apparently there was a football god back then. Apparently because they had gone for a stroll on the Reeperbahn the evening before. The winners received a not too frenetic reception at the main train station – six fans were waiting for the team. They probably didn’t even know the result.

Epic final between 1. FC Nürnberg and HSV

So that’s how it started, and anyone who thought that the teething troubles were over was proven wrong just a year later. On the morning of the 1904 final between defending champions VfB and Britannia Berlin, the game was canceled because the DFB suddenly realized that the semi-finals had not taken place on neutral pitches and accepted the protest of a loser. So no master!

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This was not unique. The fight for the Victoria, as the first trophy dedicated to the Roman goddess of victory and designed accordingly, was called, was never fought more bitterly than in 1922. But there was no end to it: everything that wants to be called a “football drama” has to end with the final between 1. FC Nürnberg and Hamburger SV. They played 294 minutes, almost five hours, in two installments and yet did not determine a champion.

The first game was canceled after 189 minutes when the score was 2-2 due to darkness and the referee also had leg cramps. The replay came to an even more inglorious end after 105 minutes: after two dismissals and two injuries, there were only seven Nuremberg players left on the pitch, and referee Peco Bauwens stopped the game in accordance with the statutes.

Final game for the championship in 1922: The photo shows the Nuremberg players during the break on the field, which no one could leave due to the overcrowding of the field

Source: pa/dpa/Harro Schweizer

For those active, the demolition was a relief; However, HSV, initially declared champions, was forced to give up months later. The year 1922 also went down in the annals as masterless. Nuremberg was able to cope with it and became a comet in the football sky in the 1920s, winning the Victoria five times within seven years and being properly celebrated for it. 30,000 fans at the main train station in 1920 were a beacon of football’s rise to popularity as the country’s most popular leisure activity. The fight for the championship was correspondingly enhanced; the finals were played in ever larger stadiums.

From the Altona parade pasture to the Berlin Olympic Stadium, where games were played in front of 90,000 spectators from 1937 until the end of the war – what a change. The old masters, some may find it hard to believe, were not professionals. The Schalke team, who replaced the Nuremberg “Club” as the leading power in the 1930s, only trained on Tuesdays and Thursdays and yet played dizzyingly against all their opponents. Their first title was legendary: They were behind against Nuremberg until the 88th minute, then their future legends Fritz Szepan and Ernst Kuzorra scored. The latter was carried off the pitch unconscious; he scored his golden goal with a hernia.

In 1939, the easiest title win of all time came when Schalke swept Admira Vienna’s kickers, who had been brought home to the Reich, 9-0. Two years later, however, they looked stupid when they lost 3-4 within seven minutes against Rapid Vienna after a 3-0 lead. A too hasty headline read: “Viennese football waltz disenchanted by Schalke Kreisel” – it was never printed.

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The drama occupied the audience on that Sunday in June 1941 hardly less than the German invasion of the Soviet Union the night before. During the war, at the request of the Nazi leadership, the game continued undeterred and the illusion of normality was maintained. What was unusual, however, was that the kick-off times for the finals were announced at very short notice so that the English Royal Air Force could not send bombing greetings to the Olympic Stadium. The last champion before the collapse of the Nazi regime was Dresdner SC under the later national coach Helmut Schön; In 1944 there was a going-out suit as a bonus. The Dresden team remained the last champions from the East, which was separated for a good 40 years and, after reunification, has not been able to send any competitive clubs into the Bundesliga, which was founded in 1963.

When the Victoria was lost in the East Berlin coal cellar

When things started again after the war in 1948, there were 300,000 requests for tickets for the final between Nuremberg and Kaiserslautern (2:1). The winner received a laurel wreath, because the Victoria was lost in an East Berlin coal cellar – until 1990. A new trophy was needed, and from 1949 the now well-known silver bowl was held up to the sky. When it comes to the question of the first winner of the said trophy, some candidates would fail with Günther Jauch – not much has been heard from VfR Mannheim since then. However, the winner was not a coincidence; the first post-war years were dominated by the clubs from the south and southwest, whose top leagues were the strongest.

VfR Mannheim won the championship in 1949 with a 3-2 win after extra time against Borussia Dortmund. The game was played in Stuttgart’s Neckar Stadium in front of 92,000 spectators

Those: picture alliance/dpa-DENA

The time came for the “Walter-Elf” from Kaiserslautern. When she wanted to defend her title in Hamburg against Hannover 96 in 1954, she experienced a 1:5 debacle. The audience provoked the national coach Sepp Herberger, who was present, and shouted his name to express how wrong he was to take five Lauterers, but no 96ers, to the World Cup. The “boss” stood up manfully from his stand and let himself be booed. Six weeks later he and his runners-up became world champions in Bern.

Borussia Dortmund won the last real final 3-1 against 1. FC Köln in 1963, then came the Bundesliga and with it a schedule. A champion is determined in 34 games; according to Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, it is “the most honest title” because it levels out the influence of luck, bad luck, coincidence and referee errors. It wasn’t the end of the tension, at least in the decades before the eleven-year Bayern era that has now ended.

And in the end, FC Bayern laughed again

In 1972, for example, there was a real final between Bayern and Schalke (5:1), and in 1992 three teams went into the final round with equal points. VfB Stuttgart was the lucky winner, world champion Guido Buchwald made himself immortal with a goal when they were outnumbered, and so did the losing coach with his saying: “Lebbe goes again,” said Frankfurt’s Dragoslav Stepanovic. Since then, this saying has been emblazoned on pub walls, coffee mugs and T-shirts in the Hesse metropolis and may provide consolation to all those who became famous because they did not become champions.

Like Bremen’s Michael Kutzop, who hit the post in the penultimate minute in what felt like the championship final on the penultimate matchday of 1985/86 against Bayern. It was his only missed shot in the Bundesliga, and in the end Bayern laughed once again, who were henceforth accused of being a stupid club. A bit unfair with 32 titles.

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In 2000, however, they were back in this drawer when Michael Ballack’s own goal on the village square in Unterhaching took Bayer Leverkusen away from what they thought was safe and earned them a nickname: it was the birth of “Vizekusen”. They’ve finally been able to laugh about it since last week. “Never German champion”? Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that.

But the Bayern duel is alive. Their last-minute championship in 2001 remains unsurpassed, when Schalke celebrated at home for four minutes before Swede Patrik Andersson hit a controversial free kick through a gap in the HSV wall. On that day, a special championship title was awarded to Schalke, who had been starving since 1958. They have been the “masters of hearts” ever since.