Taking a stand against unreasonable demands – inside and outside the stadium
The stadiums are full. Sponsor logos cover the stands and jerseys, every square meter is marketed, every fan is declared a target group. At the same time, people are cutting, saving and upgrading outside the arena. Youth centers are closing, social work is being cut back, cultural offerings are disappearing, rents are rising, working conditions are becoming less secure. The same people who stand in the block on weekends live under the conditions of this policy on weekdays. Austerity, rearmament and repression do not affect an abstract society, but rather them personally as wage earners – and thus a significant part of the organized fan scenes.
The attack on fan culture is concrete. Conferences of interior ministers decide on new security laws, legitimize collective punishments, tighten stadium bans and expand surveillance. A new compulsory military service would particularly affect those milieus from which the active fans come: young people from precarious backgrounds, trainees, workers, students with no prospects. What is being negotiated here is not a security issue, but rather class politics – with direct consequences for our own ranks.
The dividing line therefore does not run between football and politics. It runs between top and bottom, between those who decide and those who bear the consequences. When austerity programs are sold as “necessary”, militarization as “responsibility” and repression as “order”, these are not neutral constraints, but politics in the interests of those in power.
There is something opposing it, let’s call it: a different morality. It arises from collective experience, from mutual dependence and from the knowledge that you can only rely on each other. In the curves, this morality is practiced every day: through solidarity-based financing, reliable division of labor, collective organization and mutual support. Solidarity is not a phrase here, but a necessity.
Ultras and active fans mainly come from those social milieus that are affected by precarity, loss of real wages and the dismantling of public infrastructure. Class affiliation does not end at the stadium gate. Football itself has long followed the logic of profit, control and exclusion. Rising prices, personalized tickets and repression are an expression of the same social development that shapes the everyday lives of fans.
Internationally, fan scenes have shown that they can be political actors: in resistance to austerity policies, police violence, corruption and fascism. Solidarity with Palestine also arises from this experience – not from foreign policy expertise, but from the experience of state violence and inequality. This is precisely why a blank space is particularly deplorable. Despite existing practices of solidarity, many German fans are hardly reacting to the current attacks on their own living conditions. Little is heard about austerity policies, rearmament and security laws.
The organizational potential is obvious. Choreographies, boycotts and protests do not arise spontaneously, but through planning, discipline and collective reliability. What works on the block can also work on the street. These struggles should not be juxtaposed, but rather waged together – because the causes are also the same.
The only question is which side of the barricades you are on. The attacks on fan culture, social rights and personal freedom make the decision inevitable. Only then can the curve be more than a place of symbolic opposition – and solidarity become a political practice.
