Germany: An anarchist soccer team playing to win

Lars Wallrodt

Die Welt

Germany’s most anarchic, leftist soccer club is trying to go big-league, said Lars Wallrodt. FC St. Pauli has always prided itself on being the soccer team of rebellion. Based in St. Pauli, the red-light district of Hamburg, the club draws its fan base from the far-left youth who live in the neighborhood’s squats. These are not your typical soccer hooligans. In St. Pauli’s decrepit stadium, “pirate flags flutter, symbolizing anarchy, and the air is thick with marijuana smoke.”

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That the team is a perennial underdog only adds to its image as maverick. Only once in the past 15 years did the team win enough matches to make it into the top division of German soccer. Part of the problem was money. The stadium had no box seats to sell to businesses because such features “were seen as too bourgeois.”

But a few years ago, new owner Corny Littmann took over, and he’s been pouring money into the club, building a new stadium and boosting ad revenue. Littmann can get away with these changes because he has leftist credentials as the founder of an avant-garde, gay theater troupe. And he cannily agreed to make no move without input from a “congress of fans.” St. Pauli may have found how to strike a balance between “cult and commerce.”