Germany: Showing that another footballing world is possible

A lot has been said about the reason for Germany’s devastating 7-1 victory over the five time champions Brazil. I personally believe the success is down to the way German football has been structured compared to how other countries organise their game. There is always talk in the British press about how England can adopt the German system. Simply tinkering around the edges will not suffice; a whole revolution is needed if England is to drop its wild west capitalist approach to football and adopt a more social democratic interventionist approach like that practiced in Germany.

If England’s system is bad, the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) is the epitome of a crony capitalist system which has continued to centralise power without reforming at all. There has been a long history of corruption within the CBF which has been papered over by the previous success of the national team. Ricardo Terra Teixeira, the president of the CBF from 1989 to March 2012, was forced to resign in July 2012 after a Swiss prosecutor's report revealed that, during his tenure on FIFA's Executive Committee, he and his former father-in-law Joao Havelange (Former FIFA President) took more than $41 million in bribes in connection with the award of World Cup marketing rights. If this was not enough its current President Jose Maria Marin has also been criticised for corruption.  On January 25 2012, during the medal ceremony of the Copa São Paulo de Futebol Júnior, he controversially pocketed one of the winner’s medals that would be handed to Corinthian’s player Mateus.  Marin was also a member of the party of the old military dictatorship and he has been linked to the death of the journalist Vladmir Herzog in 1975.  Marin had previously made several public speeches criticising Herzog. 

Brazil’s domestic league has also been scarred by hooliganism, falling attendances and the ongoing exodus of young players to Europe. Last season, players conducted a series of protests under the banner of the Bom Senso FC (Common Sense) movement, calling for a reorganisation of the congested and confusing fixture calendar.

On the other hand Germany’s structures have been praised by progressive supporter’s groups around the world. The watershed moment for German football famously arrived at the 2000 European Championship in Belgium and Holland. An embarrassing performance at that tournament went on to trigger the transformation of the German game into a flourishing all-round culture that we have today. Fourteen years later Germany are in the World Cup final, after previous promising tournaments in 2010 and 2012. 

The German national team has benefited from the organisation of their league clubs. While growing stronger on the field, which met its pinicale in the all German Champions League Final in 2013, German clubs have purposefully retained traditions and atmospheres off the field too, attempting to balance the notion of football as the people's game in the super-commercial, globalised era.

In Germany, fans can still pay cheaply in their thousands to stand and watch their teams – 25,000 supporters in Borussia Dortmund's famed south stand Die gelbe Wand (Yellow Wall) pay a mere €11 (£8.95) a match to watch the former German champions. So, younger, older and less well-off fans can still go to games, alongside the high-end payers in the seats and luxury lounges.

The biggest change to the way German football is structured came about in 2001. This change was known as the “50% plus one rule”. This rule ensures that clubs must be controlled, with at least 50% plus one of votes on important decisions, by their members, the supporters. There is not an overseas owner in the league at all and many of its senior figures speak with bafflement at the English parade of foreign plutocrats possessing and funding the great clubs. The president of a Bundesliga club is accountable to and can be voted out by the members. The clubs and the league maintain that system because, they argue, it keeps the clubs rooted in their cities and traditions.

The "50% plus one" rule helps keep the clubs supporting the national team and grounded, focused on the football and fans, not just on the money. The Bundesliga also pays 3% of its TV income and 2% of its ticket income (second division clubs pay 3%) to the German FA to help fund grassroots training, development and social programmes. In Germany the club verein, or association, is a central feature of social life, and most sports clubs tend to be well organised, with decent facilities compared with the many British amateur sports clubs living hand-to-mouth and the rundown state of many local authority football pitches.

Football administrators with vested interests often talk about investing in youth structures to improve the national game.  Even though this is undeniably a good thing those in power conveniently ignore any changes which will affect the interests of the rich and powerful in and around football. These vested interests need to be continually challenged if we are going to get the changes we need to benefit our national teams and our supporters. 

Germany has proved that the system works.  It’s up to us make sure it is implemented.

Soccer Socialism

It is not common for a left wing European to admit his admiration for anything American, especially its “Soccer” team which has been much derided as minority sport in the USA. However, I am delighted that real football is growing in North America and the possibility of it coinciding with a shift to progressive thinking over the pond.

Much has been made of the United States' two previous World Cup matches breaking viewing records. The victory over Ghana attracted the biggest US television audience for a football match - 16m people. The draw with Portugal smashed that record with an average of 24.7m viewers. And the match against Germany in Recife is expected to surpass even that. To put this into perspective this is higher than the finals of the NBA and the Major League Baseball's hallowed World Series.

The right wing commentator and representative of the old dying America Ann Coulter has comically stated that: "Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO's Girls, light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton."

Even though the very premise is absolutely ludicrous, it is clear to me that Football is in no doubt an internationalist sport and if it is adopted as a sport of liberal America it can be a good thing in broadening the often too inward looking USA. This can only be helped by the internationalist nature of the national team which mirrors the USA in general which has seen a decline in power of the old traditional “conservative white order”.

Unlike the country as a whole the USA is more influenced by Europe rather than the growing Latin American population within USA (I am sure this community which loves football will become more influential in the national team in the near future). United States manager Jurgen Klinsmann is famously from Germany but he is not the only member of the American squad with links to the European nation. In total five US players were either born to American families in Germany or moved there as children. Including Jermiane Jones the former Blackburn Rovers player (another reason why I have soft spot for the USA team).

There has also been a growth in progressive analysis of football in America including by Dave Zirin at Edge of Sports, the Howler Radio Podcast and the academic Dr Tim Walters who founded the “Occupy Football” movement.

However, it should not go unnoticed that the US system of sport (such as the NFL, MBA and baseball) despite being more nationalistic and inward looking in nature, is certainly more socialistic compared to football in the way it is run due to the draft system, wage caps and strong player unions. 

Only time will tell whether the popularity of football will remain when/if they get  knocked out of the World Cup, and whether or not it will  be seen as part of a broader shift in social values in the country. This is an area I will be following closely.