Quote (B4al @ 3 Mar 2020 23:39)
It's lame from the supporters.
The guy just paid back the community and suported his birthplace (boyhood) club. Don't see what the issue is here ? The fact that his father was recruited by the Nazi ? Lots of people were, should we deny them the right to live and breathe ? Plus he was 5 at that time.
There are shitloads of rich people that don't really care, football players or the likes of billionaires that sit on a pile of cash without actually reaching out to the community. He invested, promoted the club and kept it afloat. I don't see it that bad to be able (as a kid) to have a team to support in a farwaway place. In time it will grow and depending on playstyle and long-term plan it could gain a fanbase. Meanwhile the guy pays the bill.
i'm not saying he personally deserves those attacks. he doesn't. from what i can tell he seems to be a decent human being who donates generously to charity and cancer research, and just happens to be a big fan (and even former player iirc) of his home town club, who invested a lot of money to make it successful, which in itself is hardly objectionable.
the issue is a bit more complicated than that though, and it's a bit unfortunate how hopp became the face of what's actually
at the core of the fan protest, which is the commercialisation of football. because hoffenheim is certainly not the first, or even the most prominent case of a club with an exception to the strict ownership rules (called the '50+1 rule' here): bayer (the clue is in the name) leverkusen and wolfsburg have similar exceptions and did it earlier than hoffenheim, and always received their fair share of criticism and mockery for their corporate owners and relatively small 'natural' fan bases.
with hoffenheim, i would say there are four main reasons why they seem to be the main focus of fans opposing such structures:
- their rapid ascendancy through several tiers of german football, with (at least compared to their opponents in lower leagues) sheer endless financial opportunities
- hoffenheim (population of just 3k) itself is, unlike leverkusen (160k) or wolfsburg (125k) for example, a really tiny village club that had virtually no fanbase or history
- in dietmar hopp, there is only one single person who owns the club, and that's easier to target than a massive corporation like bayer or volkswagen
- he wasn't particularly smart about handling the first massive attacks against him. this whole thing would probably have cooled down if he had just ignored them and not given those people any reason to think they could achieve anything by targeting him personally. he got very upset though, and filed an official police complaint (which is of course his right to do, but again, not particularly clever - he should have just
'gif of woody harrelson drying his tears with $100 notes'). now everyone knows that you will get a whole lot of media attention by insulting him.
additionally, there's an element that i eluded to earlier, which lead to the massive escalation we saw last weekend: negotiating with fangroups, the DFB previously promised not to impose collective sanctions anymore, but broke that promise by banning dortmund fans entirely from away games in hoffenheim for the next couple of years - so unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with the matter, the whole case heated up again the matchday following that verdict. so banners against hopp should really be seen as banners against a multitude of things: collective punishment, the DFB, club ownership exceptions, and yes, of course plastic clubs like hoffenheim in the bundeliga too - but not exclusively.
on a sidenote: you might think it's strange that bayern fans, of all people, would indirectly display their solidarity with dortmund supporters that way, but that's just part of the ultra scene: when it comes to criticising the association or (perceived) deficits in the sport itself (like kick-off times, pyro, commercialisation...) even bitter rivalries are just secondary.
This post was edited by fender on Mar 3 2020 06:10pm