Under the headline ‘An example for all to follow?’ the cover story of the April 2013 issue of German football magazine ‘11 Freunde’ featured Union Berlin. With the kind permission of ’11 Freunde’ and the article’s author, Christoph Biermann, here is our translation of that story…

Text: Christoph Biermann / Translation: Jon Darch / Photos: Felix

FC Union Berlin – An example for all to follow?

Despite believing in terraces and affinity with their fans, the Berliners are doing fine on the pitch as well!

AND NEVER FORGET … it could all be very different. Union Berlin have found a successful way to steer a path between commercialism and staying close to their fans. What can other clubs learn from them?

Just how cool is it when 25,000 people sing your name? When this song is the expression of their sheer delight at being more than equal to their great local rivals? When down on the pitch you’ve worked your socks off, then put the ball down for a free-kick and from the stands a song starts up to the tune of the old hit ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’?

Torsten Mattuschka, du bist der beste Mann,

Torsten Mattuschka, du kannst was keiner kann.

Torsten Mattuschka, hau ihn rein für den Verei..ei..ein

Torsten Mattuschka, you’re the best man,

Torsten Mattuschka, you do what no other can.

Torsten Mattuschka, smash it home for the clu..u..ub

When the 25,000 in the sell-out crowd at the Olympic Stadium sing “Ver-ei-ein” and carry the momentum of the last syllable forward, in order to start all over again. Again and again, even after the free-kick has long since flown over the Hertha BSC bar. How cool is that for Union Berlin’s club captain? “It doesn’t get any better!” says Torsten Mattuschka, who all the fans call “Tusche”, rubbing his hands up his arms. “Outstanding! Nothing to beat it! You get goose bumps all over!” Even now, as he sits over a cup of coffee in a restaurant in Oberschöneweide and the Berlin derby is long since history.

In relation to “Tusche”, it’s important to know that he’s already been with Union for eight years and that he’s been promoted with the team first of all from the fourth to the third tier and then right up to the Second Bundesliga. On the way up, he’s smashed a fair few wonderful free kicks home for the club and made countless magical passes. And he’s had days to forget, when above all he’s looked slow and the fans on the terraces have sympathetically wondered whether perhaps he’s once again had a beer or a Coke too many. After all, we all know how hard it is to control our weight. At the club they joke that all Tusche has to do is drive past McDonald’s to put on a kilo. But he’s able to laugh it off: “Clearly I’m no Bambi – more a bit of a lump.”

So, what is going on at Union Berlin that they worship – like no other player in Germany – a trained painter and decorator with latent weight problems, and whose name many readers are probably now hearing for the first time? For who else has their own song that is regularly sung by an entire stadium? And I really mean, the entire stadium! But that is just one of the questions that now arise with Union currently faring better than ever before. Tusche and his team are now established in the upper regions of the second division and it is no longer an absurd notion that they may one day achieve promotion to the top flight. Elsewhere, too, the club is breaking one record after another, chalking up over 11,000 members for the first time ever and heading towards revenues for this season of almost €20 million. That too is a first!

This summer the main stand, clad in the clinker brick style of Oberschöneweide industrial architecture, will also be finished and with it the complete “Stadium by the Old Forester’s Lodge”, which in many respects is one of a kind.

The path there, however, from the Berlin of 24-hour nightlife, of exciting start-ups and of cool young dudes, from Berlin the capital city of expensive restaurants full of politicians and poseurs is a long one. Once past Ostkreuz, it soon becomes so drab that even the most determined champion of gentrification will probably never create any new trendy district here. And while Köpenick itself may have the feel of a lakeside summer resort, before you get there you first go through areas of run-down industry and grey desolation.

If, however, on a floodlit Friday evening you wander around the “Stadion An der Alten Försterei”, you quickly sense that something very special has grown up here out of this drab backdrop. You could easily call the whole thing a “cult” experience, but that would be to simplify matters too much. It begins on the walk from the local train station, as the fans on the way to the stadium silently hand over their empties to an army of beer bottle collectors. It’s a small gesture of solidarity from those that don’t have much with those that have even less. It continues with the club’s office building, which really is an old forester’s lodge and in its cute appearance comes over as the fairytale-like opposite of everything that epitomises a professional club’s admin complex in this day and age. And, of course, sitting there at the reception in the shape of Frau Lehmann is a friendly soul, who was already working here back in the days when Erich Honecker was still head of state.

Many at the ground have come straight from their manual jobs, are still in their work clothes and are settling in for an enjoyable evening with beer, cigarettes and football. On top of that, they sing constantly – even before kick-off – on the terraces that make up six sevenths of the stadium, something that is not to be found at any other ground in either of the top two Bundesliga divisions. And as you stand there it may well be that you’re standing on a step that the man next to you built in his spare time, as from the summer of 2008 two and a half thousand Union fans helped the ailing club to modernise the stadium – providing in total 140,000 hours of free labour over a twelve-month period. And others were perhaps even involved a few years earlier, when fans urged their fellow supporters to give blood and donate the payment they received to Union to help the club gain its licence for the Regional League. “Bleed for Union” was the rallying call back then.

Standing just inside gate 11 is Jochen Lesching. With grey hair and a moustache, the 72-year-old is a member of Union’s supervisory board. Tonight in his red club jacket he’s selling copies of the stadium magazine, which incidentally is produced by the fans and is more of a fanzine than a programme. Of course, meeting the fanbase Lesching has to listen to the odd moan and groan. “The board now need to step in and get the team motivated, the coach isn’t doing it,” complains one purchaser. Since the much celebrated 2-2 draw with Hertha in the Olympic Stadium, things have not been going so well any more. So Lesching, whose company prints the programme, again willingly lends an understanding ear. What’s more, he’s probably the only club official in Germany still with pithy Brechtian quotes in his head. And no wonder, as he did after all used to work in the GDR Ministry of Culture. “It is we ourselves, who must look out for ourselves,” wrote Bertolt Brecht and that, in fact, is precisely what happens at Union.

Sven Mühle too, admittedly only 40 but likewise already grey, is also standing outside the stadium selling something. The ‘V.I.R.U.S.’ hut is next to the beer garden, in the middle of which there stands an enormous hard hat and below it the panels showing the names of all those who helped with the stadium development – called the ‘Stadium Builder Monument’. ‘V.I.R.U.S.’ is an amalgamation of mainly older fans and fan groups, who in the main were already regulars at the stadium back in the days of the GDR. Once a year they organise a special train. This year it was to the game in Cologne. The scarf emblazoned with “We’ll leave the cathedral in ‘Kölle’, but we’re taking the points back home” is no longer selling well, as Union lost there 2-0. “But anyway we’ve only got 80 of them left,” says Mühle. Business is brisk at the hut, where ‘V.I.R.U.S.’ sell their own merchandise. The only thing they can’t use is the club emblem. In fact, it’s busier here than at the club’s official sales stand across the way.

Mühle is proud of the fact that the club gives them such freedom: “The fans are taken seriously here”, he says. And that’s not by way of any patronising or strategic approach. For since the rebuilding of the stadium and the sale of shares in the new main stand to club members, the “Stadion An der Alten Försterei” is now – if it wasn’t already – really their stadium. “People are fed up of everything being decided behind closed doors,” he says. “But at Union everyone is important, everyone is needed and everyone gets taken along together. You don’t get that feeling all that often in our society.”

That, of course, opens up a rather big Pandora’s box, as there’s a price to pay for this feeling. For people who look out for themselves, can also decide not to bother any more about certain other things. Like sponsors for corner kicks, for example, or for substitutions. Like pre-match entertainment or a half-time show as a vehicle for product promotion. For sponsors that doesn’t exactly make things easy. Recently at Europe’s largest sports business conference, club president Dirk Zingler, 48, said in a presentation: “Our sponsors are just as important to us as the ordinary fan. But in our environment sponsors can only be successful if their promotion is in keeping with what we stand for and if they respect the expectations of our fans.” That sounds for one thing a bit impertinent: yes, you can advertise, but do make an effort! And that is indeed how the marketing experts understood it. “And when I then told them that we try to protect our 90 minutes, I could really feel them wince. What? I could sense they were thinking. But those are the very 90 minutes that we want!”

In light of the perverse sponsorship logic, the insistence on pure football and the Brechtian quotes, there are two questions that automatically need to be asked. Namely whether Union is a ‘different’ sort of club and – more on this later – what it all has to do with its history, with East German football and the GDR. But those are precisely the questions that cause Dirk Zingler to get a bit prickly, no matter how friendly a chat you’re having over a quick cigarette sat on the sofa in the corner of his office on the top floor for of the club admin building. And no wonder, as the questions open up huge possibilities for misunderstanding. “To be different is not our business aim,” says Zingler. “We don’t sit down together and think about how we can set ourselves apart from other clubs or how we can sharpen up our brand profile. We’ve simply already got our own profile.” You could also call that avoiding the St Pauli trap, where once fans too were the driving force behind the club’s ascent, only for it ultimately to become impossible to differentiate between their obstinacy and the marketing of their obstinacy.

Perhaps it is Union’s good fortune that at the moment of its direst need there was nothing left for the club to do than to reflect on it own principles and go back to its roots. In 2004, when Union had dropped down to the fourth tier for the first time ever, it was a major crisis point for the club, not just on the field and financially, but psychologically as well. Years of chaos with club executives without any real ties to Union had emaciated the club. There was nothing left for it back then but to carry on with the people who, despite it all, were always there: the fans.

One of them – and that’s not without its importance either – was Zingler, who even today is more fan than chairman. The dangers that exist in such situations are something that the successful owner of a logistics business for building materials has dealt with skilfully. But he had to learn how to do that, as in the first few years he still believed in the imaginary ‘laws of the football industry’. “At that time I used to listen to people from within the game. So if a head coach was supposedly bad, he had to go and the next one be brought in.” Now, Uwe Neuhaus, a very dry Westphalian, is already in his seventh season as head coach at Union. To date he has never had to talk to Zingler about any player’s on-field performance.

It’s not, of course, as though Zingler and his colleagues on the executive and supervisory boards have no opinion on such matters. Indeed, Zingler can be quite vociferous on the subject, but only within the guarded cocoon of his family and old friends, with whom he’s been going to the ground for years. Outside of that environment he and the other board members have imposed on themselves an iron vow of silence.

When it comes to recruiting players the club has now also imposed on itself a quality management procedure. After clever scouting and sophisticated analysis by the ‘Iron lab’, votes are cast on each would-be new recruit not only by the head coach and his assistant, but also the press officer, head of marketing and youth academy manager. “If I get five green lights, then I sign the contract without needing to know who the player is,” says Zingler. The system is designed to ensure from all the various perspectives that the player suits the club. That avoids lots of secretive whispering, as goes on at many clubs, and ultimately strengthens the position of the head coach, as nobody can then say at a later date that they knew better.

When Tusche arrived eight years ago, none of that yet existed. Nevertheless, he is the ideal Union player, as strange as that may initially seem. Aged 14, Torsten Mattuschka was expelled from the Energie Cottbus youth academy because his school work failed to make the grade. “I was incredibly lazy,” he says. After that things got no better. “Ah yes, when I was still young and impressionable I went out one time drinking with the boys and we scored with a couple of girls.” At some point along the way seventh-tier Dissenchen 04 offered him a trainee’s position as a painter and decorator. At a fighting weight of approaching 16 stone, he slammed in 100 goals in 100 games (“I stuck out my arse, turned and shot”). Then Ede Geyer took him back to Energie Cottbus. Admittedly he didn’t make the big breakthrough there into the Bundesliga, but now weighing under 13 stone he got his foot in the door of the professional game. Today he is 32 and does indeed sometimes wonder if he could have achieved more.

Tusche’s career has certainly had nothing to do with single-minded planning. Plenty, however, with real life. The club, which has a history that is actually no different, seems to be a magnet for all those whose path in life has taken a rather zigzag course. Director and programme seller Jochen Lesching trained as an electrician, was an amateur cabaret performer and in his research thesis examined ‘Society’s Use of Rock in the GDR’. He ended up in the Ministry of Culture, then as a trade unionist at the Friedrichstadtpalast variety theatre and aged over 50 began anew in the advertising business and later as a printer. ‘V.I.R.U.S.’ man Sven Mühle also experienced several twists and turns between life as a chef and building up a marketing platform in amateur football. Media man Christian Arbeit, too, is one of these heroes of everyday life. He once studied social education and was then manager of a multiplex cinema, before he initially became stadium announcer and then four years ago press officer as well.

Of course, such biographies also have a bit to do with the end of the GDR and therefore the question has to be asked once again: how big a part does the East play in the club’s identity? Internally it is a question that has already been answered. In 2010, when Hertha BSC got relegated, the directors discussed whether Union should consciously position itself as the club from the East. They decided against doing so. That was not intended to be a break with the past. Nor could it be. Christian Arbeit, for example, who went to his first game at the Alte Försterei as a twelve-year-old in 1986, says that the terraces at that time were “a meeting place for people with alternative views, long hair, parkas, desert boots and jeans.” He has stayed true to the style of that time just as loyally as the fans have stuck with their battle cry “Und niemals vergessen: Eisern Union” (And never forget: Iron Union!). However, despite one or two rebellious gestures in the stadium, Arbeit has no wish to create a legend of dissidence: “In those days you used to seek out nooks and crannies where you’d be left in peace.” Even if that was amongst the blokes in Union’s noisy stadium.

But even then one thing had already become deeply ingrained in the psyche of the club. “I guess it’s in our genes to question authority,” says Arbeit. The most recent body to experience that was the German Football League (DFL), where the very mention of the anti-authority club from the capital is enough to put their backs up. Populist playing to the gallery is how the DFL has categorised Union’s conduct in the animated debate surrounding the new plans for stadium safety. That is an interesting misinterpretation, because actually all that the club was insisting on, in what was after all a democratic process, was a right to their own opinion. “We don’t do anything just for the sake of it. Everything we do is for our community. What matters to us is how what we do affects the people it concerns,” says Zingler. Namely the members of the club and its fans and not any DFL demanding a form of high treason. That too is one of the reasons why Union voted against the ‘Safe Stadium Experience’ proposals.

This whole stubborn refusal to tread hackneyed paths has also led in recent times to more and more representatives from other clubs coming to Berlin. They’ve wanted to find out what it actually is that makes the eccentrics from Union different. And why that still works. “I’m never able to answer the question, because I don’t know where other clubs could start,” says Zingler, and in saying so he’s not playing dumb. It is probably more the case that everyone in and around the club evidently has an inner compass that shows them the way. Or to put it another way, it’s as though they’re running a small laboratory, conducting trials to see if football will obey laws different to the ones accepted up until now.

And nor is the structure of the experiment so complicated that bits of it couldn’t be copied elsewhere. After all, at Union all they’ve done is set straight again many aspects that have been turned upside down in recent years. Therefore football at the Alte Försterei is not made to fit the sponsors’ needs, but the other way around. Therefore the playing side is left to those responsible for it and the directors keep their noses out. Therefore there’s no ‘us against them’ with the club’s own fans, even if they can sometimes be a pain. And therefore Torsten Mattuschka can say in his pithily clear way: “If you win a game here, you can make lots of people happy. They want to see us running, fighting and winning, then the week for all of them is great. For a player there’s nothing better.” However, many people, and that really doesn’t apply only in Berlin, don’t just want to win, they want a sense of belonging as well. Not just at the football, but especially there. The shirt-sleeve mentality, the pragmatism and the forgoing of any self-deception demonstrated by Union would in many places certainly be a good start.

Granted, the folk out there in Köpenick are sometimes very full of themselves. Of course, the terraces there are not filled with any better people striving for a better world. And the club has not always had such a confident demeanour as it does right now. For instance, three years ago when it got taken in by the dubious sponsor ISP. Things also got pretty questionable earlier this year when Christian Arbeit delivered a highly demagogic pre-match address because the club was so annoyed by a journalist’s report on Zingler’s military service in the Stasi Felix Dzierzynsky Guards Regiment. And should the club’s success story continue, countless banana skins naturally lie in wait. For they have no idea yet just how dangerous the drug ‘success’ can be!

Late on this Friday evening, with the game long since over, a couple of fairly inebriated Scandinavian businessmen wearing red-and-white scarves are standing together on top of the portaloo next to the VIP marquee, jabbering away avidly to each other. What are they doing here? Do they after all want to buy a couple of housing blocks here in the dreary East? Or are they already those plastic fans jumping on the Union bandwagon that are mocked in Hertha fan Daniel Rimkus’ rattling song:

“You come from Stuttgart, you poor fool /

You live at Hackeschen, find Union pretty cool.”

Unfortunately it’s no longer possible to discuss that with the Norwegians, as they’re far too drunk.

You suspect that many more interesting questions will arise in Köpenick. But they seem to be prepared for them: “There is no Union ideal,” says Dirk Zingler. “The club must continue to develop. Things that we find good today might already look different in a couple of years from now.” That, as we know, is the sort of thing that we’re taught by real life with all its trials and tribulations – something with which those at the Alte Försterei are certainly very well acquainted.

This article first appeared in German in the April 2013 edition of 11 Freunde.

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