The foundries are quiet now, but the local soccer stadium is the biggest in Germany. A sea of distinctive yellow and black, the team colors, forms at every sellout match, especially when fans sing local soccer anthems, another feature imported from England, but arguably stronger now here.

Mr. Hesse, an editor at the soccer magazine 11Freunde and author of “Tor! The Story of German Football,” said the exhibit focused on the national team at the expense of tradition-laden clubs from the gritty Ruhr down to Bayern Munich.

But that dominance mirrors the way soccer is drowning out other sports. After the 1980s surge of tennis through Boris Becker and Steffi Graf, “football is really pushing everything else aside,” Mr. Hesse said, with even fourth-division games broadcast live on television while a recent world championship in handball, popular across Continental Europe, was ignored.

The Dortmund museum has fun features, like one that lets you become your own game commentator from actual broadcast booths. Visitors can vote on whether the notorious third goal for England — when it clinched its lone World Cup, against Germany in 1966 — was, or was not, over the line. (The vote on a recent visit, perhaps no surprise, ran 57 percent against England.)

But the museum does not shy from Germany’s past. The national team of 1941 is seen giving the Nazi salute before a game in Sweden. An infamous 1944 propaganda film runs, showing Jewish inmates at the Nazis’ Theresienstadt camp near Prague playing soccer and ostensibly enjoying a relaxed life. (In reality, most were about to be shipped to Auschwitz.)