Football fans and police | Are politicians intentionally allowing the “stadium alliances” to fail?

Many football fans feel betrayed by the police and politicians. Photo: imago/Sven Simon "Football should take place in safe stadiums and be fun, without violence and without pyrotechnics," announced Herbert Reul in September 2020. This was what the Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia promised at the time from a cooperation agreement that the professional clubs of the first three leagues from North Rhine-Westphalia had concluded with the Interior Ministry and the Federal Police. “At the same time, we have to noticeably reduce the burden on the police so that every game does not become a constant operation,” demanded the CDU man with the introduction of the “stadium alliances”. Recently, six years later, Reul announced again that he wanted to deploy fewer police at football games in the future.

Then as now, this is good news, as a top politician is distancing himself from a supposed truism that very few people still question: "A lot helps a lot." And in the football context that means: "The more police, the safer a game." Which might even work somehow if peace-loving people didn't feel provoked at some point when they were treated like serious criminals from the train station to the stadium gate. And if the police always behaved in football the way they do towards Lieschen Müller when she reports a theft.

The fact that the often absurdly high levels of police deployment, even outside of high-risk games, which in turn are seen by too many fans as a free pass to misbehave, is at best like white ointment is part of the expert knowledge. Simply because, according to police statistics, football games themselves are significantly safer than comparable large-scale events. But even those who know this sometimes may not be able to abandon their usual thinking: If at a game with 30,000 visitors there is nothing to note apart from four wild peeers that could affect the feeling of security of uninvolved citizens, then that is precisely because there were so many police there.

In this respect, it was remarkable that the police had started making fact-based arguments a year before Reul's first statement. Suddenly, police representatives even cited studies, in this case one from Potsdam University of Applied Sciences in 2019, according to which “all respondents, regardless of whether they are from the fan scene, clubs or spectators, say that there are too many police there on match days,” said Uwe Stahlmann, a police officer in the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of the Interior, at the time, and came to the conclusion: “Then you have to question yourself.” As a result, the concept of “stadium alliances” emerged, which in short works like this: both clubs, the respective ones During a game, the municipality, the security services and the police agree on a common operational strategy with the aim of using as few officers as possible.

Less police at run-of-the-mill games, but a strict separation of the respective ultra groups - that could actually have been a way that would have saved the general public a lot of costs. And at the same time would have ensured more security. But unfortunately that remained a pious wish. On the one hand, because the willingness to use violence in some ultra scenes became ritualized in some places after the corona pandemic. But also because politicians in particular seem to have no interest in truly objectifying the debate.

An example of this: The vexed debate about pyrotechnics needs a necessary differentiation. Anyone who still equates pyrotechnics with violence has understood nothing. Especially not if he doesn't distinguish whether it is being used properly, i.e. not leaving his hand, or whether it is being thrown, which is criminal and extremely dangerous. Reul was already the populist in 2020 - and has learned nothing in the past six years. Even now he is trying to level things up: "Anyone who fires up or strikes in the stadium has no place there."

And that's enough of the good news, let's move on to pressing questions. Is it actually possible that the renewed enthusiasm in the state interior ministries for stadium alliances is not about a changed security concept? But perhaps about passing on costs to the municipalities? For example, securing the fan marches to the stadiums was taken over by officials until the summer. The police still consider these demonstrations to be dangerous - because of the nasty pyrotechnics - but want to leave the accompaniment of the marches to the municipalities in the future. So de facto often poorly trained mini-jobbers who are supposed to be paid by the cash-strapped municipalities.

Since last weekend, however, another suspicion has arisen: Does the actual master plan envisage not allowing ultras to come to the stadiums in the future? True to the logic familiar to some interior ministers, according to which there are no longer any harmful bark beetles in a forest that has been cleared by fire. Last season, Ultra buses were repeatedly checked for hours at motorway service stations in federal states far from the venue or sent back straight away.

Last Sunday, according to the Darmstadt Fan Aid, the police showed a different way of getting Ultras out of the stadiums. At Karlsruhe main train station, around 300 Darmstadt 98 fans were searched and photographed for nine hours - subjected to what police slang called "extensive identification measures". Another passage from the fan aid protocol reads like something you wouldn't want to read in a democracy: "According to our observations, several federal police officers drove numerous people up a corridor towards a track using batons for no apparent reason to us. Masked police were waiting upstairs. The fact is that there were many seriously injured fans afterwards. There was dead silence in the Karlsruhe stadium, the other 1,500 Lilien fans refused to support.

Back to Karlsruhe main station: According to consistent statements from several neutral train passengers who were on the same train as the arrested Darmstadt supporters, not the slightest thing happened on the train journey that could have interested the police. The federal police therefore cite violent clashes in previous encounters. In addition, »several masked football fans from SV Darmstadt 98 are said to have taped up cameras on trains at Heidelberg main station during the arrival phase. In addition, a large proportion of the approximately 400 fans who arrived on platform 6 are said to have masked up on the journey to and after the stop at Karlsruhe Central Station." Reason enough for police violence.

By the way, Karlsruhe is in Baden-Württemberg, the country that invented the stadium alliances.

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