According to a survey on my social media account, most of you recently wanted a column on the topic of “BVB”. Which gets me in trouble, to be honest. Both the weight of meaning and the complexity, or rather missing The complexity of the phenomenon “Example Club Borussia Dortmund” overwhelms me. I have no idea from which side I should approach the topic. To be honest, I’m one of maybe four Dortmunders who doesn’t have a single interest in football. And I mean not the bean.
I tried it! But football has always been something that, in my eyes, has such an over-emotional promise every single time not I’m not surprised that men are behind it.
Incidentally, men can live everything in football that they cannot afford in normal existence: emotionality and borderline stupidity. “It would be a bicycle chain”, anyone who exposes themselves in front of the camera with such language is, in real life, as people in the Ruhr area say: “Capable of anything but of no use.”
Or the one with the “big emotions”. Where are they in a partnership, for example? Where are they when the man sometimes has to show himself vulnerable, when he has to deal with defeat or admit to unrehearsed feelings? Why does the stadium get the things that men traditionally like to attribute to women, namely sensitivity and simplicity? It simply remains a mystery.
A summer with Andy Möller
At least this proves that we are more than the influences of our parents, because my father, who was born in Dortmund, is a huge BVB fan, and that rubbed off on me. The fact that he’s also a drummer probably rubbed off (see previous column), but his martial outbursts at a BVB game didn’t make me ever interested in this club – except for half the summer Year 1996. I thought for a moment, now I have to see what it’s all about and then I got these trading cards with pictures of Stéphane Chapuisat, Matthias Sammer or Andy Möller at the kiosk, which I don’t know where left behind, nor what I did with it back then. Have you looked at them? Grown men, I’m eleven, but you’re at BVB, so it’s okay?
What frustrates me most about football is its lack of complexity. There are eleven men who stand on the pitch and pass the ball back and forth until it goes into the goal – or not. And that was it. The pure Storytelling For me, football is disproportionate to its social and economic dominance.
I can remember that when BVB lost, my father really had a dark cloud around his head for days and still does to some extent today. I have to say, something like that is a metaphysical failure.
Which came first, the bad mood or the bad football?
What I’ve always found strange: how men gather in front of the screens and then scream at them. In a bar, at public viewing or at home. In this way, they accuse the players on the pitch of not doing what is obviously required. I find that absurd. As a child, for example, you sit next to them and think, uh, they can’t hear you at all…
As this child, I couldn’t handle the force of emotions and loud demands with the obvious disruption in the sender-receiver relationship, and that’s why I thought, well, these are adults after all, then maybe there is magicthen maybe that’s just the way it is?
However, there haven’t been enough incidents in my life to support the existence of magic. In any case, the measly number of free kicks that were possibly shouted did not convince me.
Unlived eroticism?
Maybe homoeroticism in football would still be a thing, which I would find interesting. In other words, men who don’t admit to themselves that they like young men. Men who don’t admit that they like Jürgen Klopp. Men who don’t admit everything to themselves, can’t live with feelings that they actually have, that they don’t even know they have. And that everything is secretly bubbling under the surface and condenses into an erotic direction that subconsciously draws the man back to the stadium again and again. That might keep me going, but even with that I can’t really get anywhere because the average Dortmund fan tends to shut down when it comes to homoeroticism. They either laugh at you or slap you in the mouth. Trying to talk about it, especially with older men, has proven to be, er, unproductive.
Another approach would of course be to write about BVB as a now monstrous company. Whether this is a club that exploits capitalism in an even more disgusting way than other clubs that are perhaps more “likeable” to you. Unfortunately, I never understood how a football club can be “likeable” or “unlikeable”. Of course, you can dislike FC Bayern Munich because you simply dislike rich, successful men.
Yawn…
Rhythmically clapping single-celled organisms
I could also write something about club greed from a borrowed, old-left perspective. That’s where fascism begins, right among football fans. That’s something, isn’t it? Unquestioned German club pretentiousness, a clear image of the enemy, tons of testosterone and a lot of alcohol – what could go wrong? Even single-celled organisms can intellectually make their way to the south stand and know who the opponent is. And how manageable are such herds of drunk men actually? By the way, a rite that has been trivialized and bravely ignored by everyone is questionable, namely the rhythmic clapping of the hands and the stretching of the arms at the word “Victory!”
Victory? Victory – what? Are you crazy?
Oh, but I just don’t have the energy to open this barrel now.
The fact remains: As a Dortmunder, I should like football, but I just don’t. My heart doesn’t beat black and yellow, and I just don’t feel “real love”.
At least that’s what I thought for many years…
Some time ago, on a trip to the USA, I met a bull-necked bouncer in Portland, Oregon, who was looking after the club I was about to go to, and I saw a small, black and yellow patch on his jeans jacket. The man was apparently an ardent BVB fan. I said that I happened to be from Dortmund. We immediately started talking and he bought me a beer. This black and yellow patch had earned him so much sympathy from me that I completely chatted with him and completely forgot about going dancing. At the end of his shift we went to his house.
We now live in a terraced house in Witten-Annen and have eleven children, all sons. If they all keep what the trainer promises us, my husband and I will never have to work again in just a few years.
Hey!