When we lost the European Cup Winners’ Cup final in 1981

When we lost the European fifa 15 coins Cup Winners’ Cup final in 1981, nobody took any notice of us. We had beaten AS Roma, Valencia and Benfica Lisbon with a kind of Bezirksauswahlmannschaft (‘district selection’). After such successes I should have grabbed some Deutschmark and told my players, ‘Let’s have a party’. But in the end the defeat by the heinous class enemy was held against us.6
The people’s game always remained the most popular sport in East Germany, as it did in the West. But the communist leaders never really managed to develop a successful strategy for using that popularity for the national and socialist cause. East German football could have flourished. For a country of 18 million, it was relatively successful (Hesse-Lichtenberger 2002), but the leaders continually alienated the supporters. By the time Manfred Ewald realized that ‘football has its own special value [–] individual- ism and fanaticism are often stronger than discipline and rationalism’, it was too late. He was in resigned mood when this succinct analysis was published five years after the fall of the wall (Ewald 1994: 66). The creator of the sports miracle of the GDR admitted that he had failed to come to grips with football. The dialectics of football, its interplay of collectivism and individualism, had asked too much of him and the other GDR leaders. The ways in which ‘scientific’ training methods that had worked in other sports were falsely implemented in football have been well analysed in the literature, as has the conscious neglect of team sports in general on the
basis that winning medals is much more difficult and infrequent than in individual sports (Leske 2004: 75–6). Doping, a method of increasing per- formance that could not be as easily applied to the complex ball and team sport of football as it was to individual athletics, has also been emphasized (Spitzer 2004: 55).

But it was not all down to training methods and medal planning. The specific cultural value of the people’s game was also not understood by politicians and officials who defined themselves as champions of the proletarian cause. In their will to detach the new state from everything that represented the disgraced old Germany, they did not understand that tradition is an all-important factor in football culture. East German clubs were rigorously cut off from their past as ‘bourgeois’ organizations. Clubs such as VfB Leipzig, the first German champion in 1903, or Dresdner SC, the last wartime champions in 1943 and 1944, were stripped of their names and, as in the case of Dresden, rigorously put at a grave disadvantage (Hesse- Lichtenberger 2002: 282–3). In an attempt to link sports and recreation to the new socialist folklore of the Betriebsgemeinschaften (BSG, ‘factory com- munities’), crude names were given to teams, of which ‘Stahl Stalinstadt’ (later ‘Stahl Eisenhüttenstadt’), ‘Rotes Banner

Trinwillershagen’ or ‘Aktivist fifa 15 ultimate team coins Schwarze Pumpe’ were some of the most ridiculous examples. This was reversed to some extent in 1965 when more or less independent football clubs were reintroduced and the good old ‘FC’ reappeared in the names of many top clubs (Spitzer 2004: 18). Leske (2004: 166) sees this as the begin- ning of a modest GDR football tradition of its own; yet it was just another example of the constant changes in GDR football. It was not only the names that were confusing: whole clubs were moved from town to town in order to have a better allocation of top teams to the newly founded fifteen GDR districts. The northward ‘transfer of the small Saxon team Empor Lauter to become Empor Rostock’ and eventually Hansa Rostock is a striking case in point (Hesselmann and Rosentritt 2000). Vorwärts Berlin (to Frankfurt/Oder) and Dynamo Dresden (to Berlin) were treated in a similar fashion (Leske 2004). In short: identification with the local foot- ball club, the traditional basis of all football supporting, was not made easy in the days of the GDR Oberliga.