The Most Hated Team In Germany - NOT Bayern Munich

[Bruce]

http://espnfc.com/blog/_/name/bundesliga/id/557?cc=5901

Red Bull Leipzig, currently in Germany's third division but likely to be promoted
to Bundesliga 2, is owned and by the Red Bull energy drink company in Austria.

The club is bending, perhaps mangling the rules governing ownership of football
clubs in Germany.


http://espnfc.com/blog/_/name/bundesliga/id/557?cc=5901

[Karl]

Thanks, Bruce. Great story - Had to post it just on chance

the url may 'die' at some point in the future.

---



Feb 25

3:10
AM EST

No one likes them; they don't care


Posted by Uli Hesse


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Holstein - Red Bull Leipzig Uli
Other / Uli Hesse
Holstein Kiel hosted German football's public enemy No. 1, RB Leipzig, on Saturday.
For all practical purposes, the battle between the forces of good and evil lasted just 55 minutes. Then a marvellous Sebastian Heidinger strike from almost 30 yards sealed the outcome. Since this wasn't a Peter Jackson epic but a sporting contest, the young man delivered his decisive blow not for the good guys. Heidinger was wearing the lily-white uniform of the evil empire.

As soon as the ball hit the back of the net, the majority of the home fans knew the match was lost. And so, with little else to do, the banners came out again. One of them likened the visitors to something you would find coming out of a dog. Another simply prefixed the name of the visiting team with a four-letter word. Finally the home supporters chanted: “You are destroying our game!”

The players subjected to such abuse pretended not to listen, not to read, not to notice. After Heidinger's amazing long-range shot had made it 2-0, they never allowed their opponents a proper opportunity to pull one back and comfortably ran down the clock. All in all, it was just another day at the office for the most hated club in the land.

Or maybe it was a better-than-normal day for the most hated club in the land. Yes, there were the taunts and the banners. And yes, some militant home fans had manipulated the match day posters around town, pasting over the correct name of the opposition -- RasenBallsport Leipzig -- with a strip of paper that said: “Red Bull Pigs.”

But by and large, the reception in Kiel was more civil than at some other places Leipzig have played over the past years, and especially this season. Maybe it's because Holstein Kiel already are fairly familiar with the Leipzig club, having met them in the fourth division in 2010-11 and 2011-12. But many other clubs are hosting the team known as RB Leipzig for the first time this year, after they were promoted to the third level in the summer, and find the experience unnerving or, more precisely, intolerable.




Anti-Red Bull Leipzig poster 20140127

Other / Uli Hesse
Kiel was not short of anti-Red Bull sentiment, but was not a patch on some of the receptions Leipzig have received.
In Halle, on the first day of the season, the Leipzig bus was pelted with bottles and rocks, even though 500 police officers were on hand to impose order. A few months later, visiting Rostock fans rioted in Leipzig. According to a police news release, “the storming of the stadium could only be prevented by massive police presence and the use of irritants.”

There also were a lot more police officers than usual when Leipzig came to Kiel on Saturday. Large-scale law enforcement has been a constant presence since Leipzig's first league game in August 2009, away against Jena's reserves in the fifth division. The Leipzig players on that day were spat at, and the crowd chanted, “Death to RBL.” So intimidating was the atmosphere that after the final whistle, the squad walked from the pitch straight to their coach, under police protection, and drove off without having showered or changed.

Only one player from that original squad is still with the club, reserve goalkeeper Benjamin Bellot. On Saturday, away at Kiel, he made his third professional appearance for RB. In the first half, with Leipzig defending a 1-0 lead, he made two brilliant saves, turning a header around the post on 21 minutes and denying Kiel's Manuel Hartmann from close range after a free kick eight minutes before the interval.

In the second half, Bellot went between the sticks directly in front of the home fans. They gave him a mouthful or two, but he ignored it with the dignity of a man who has heard it all before. During the tumultuous first 10 minutes after the restart, Kiel's strongest moments, he patrolled his penalty area with authority. Then Heidinger scored his beauty out of the blue, and Bellot could relax a bit.

We already have briefly touched upon the reason for all this resentment and anger (see: “Moneyball” -- June 25, 2013). RB Leipzig are not a normal German football club; quite the contrary. They are more like a smartly organised attempt at undermining the rules and regulations that govern our game. In fact, the greatest threat to the team's meteoric rise is not the sort of opposition they meet on the pitch. It's that the team's very existence could be interpreted as a contravention of the intricate German laws that regulate what is a club and what isn't.

According to those laws, clubs cannot be fully corporately owned, but everyone knows Leipzig were set up by Red Bull five years ago and are almost completely financed by the Austrian energy-drink giant. Also according to those laws, clubs have to be open to everyone and must be run by their members, but Leipzig all but turn away prospective members and are openly controlled from Red Bull's headquarters near Salzburg. In addition, a club's name and crest cannot be used for advertising purposes, but Leipzig's crest is almost identical to Red Bull's logo while the name -- RasenBallsport (lawn ball games) -- veils the true moniker so thinly it's not even really a veil.

Which is why the banners the 120 or so travelling Leipzig fans had festooned at the fence in front of the away stand in Kiel read "Bulls Club" or "LE Bulls" or even, bizarrely, "Holy Bulls." Like their players, the supporters know what this is all about and they don't care, not least because Leipzig -- the city where the German FA was founded and that spawned the first German champions -- has been starved of top-level football.

The same goes for the rest of the former East Germany. If we disregard the city of Berlin, a special case, there could be not a single Eastern club in the top two divisions next season, as Cottbus, Dresden and Aue all are currently fighting relegation from the second division. But that doesn't mean the East rallies behind Leipzig, as happened with Rostock and Cottbus when those clubs were in the Bundesliga all those years ago.

Rather, Leipzig seem to attract particular venom when they play other Eastern teams. A year ago, Jena's fans found a peaceful and yet widely reported outlet for their disgust when they secretly adorned the Leipzig stand with fake Red Bull banners. At first glance, they seemed like normal ones, which is why the police didn't pull them down, yet they carried slogans such as, “We can win a thousand games but character we'll never gain.”

Did I just say that not a single Eastern club could be in the two top flights next season? Well, that's not entirely correct, of course, because Leipzig will in all likelihood win promotion. (They currently are in second place, five points ahead of tradition-laden Darmstadt.) In fact, that's one of the many fascinating things about going to see this side play: You know you are watching a future Bundesliga team.




Ralph Rangnick Red Bull Leipzig

GettyImages
Ralf Rangnick has previous in meteoric rises, having helped Hoffenheim into the Bundesliga.
It might not happen next year or the year after that, and it might not happen with the players who are currently labelled "Red Bull pigs" wherever they go, but it will happen. Last week, Germany’s biggest football monthly devoted the cover story to the club -- "The Big Red Bull Bluff" -- and said that even the legalities won't stop this particular big red machine. The league, the story argues convincingly, will demand some modifications to the club structure from Leipzig but will not bar them outright because Red Bull then would take the matter to the courts, where delicate concepts such as the 50+1 rule -- which prevents private ownership -- could come under close scrutiny.

Some of the players who won the Kiel game for Leipzig already have been signed with an eye toward Bundesliga football, such as the young Dane Yussuf Poulsen, who has got the first touch and the vision of a top-flight footballer. (He set up the opening goal in Kiel with a fine through ball.) But most of them are simply talented and well-schooled German players, not fading stars or expensive foreign imports.

Just watching them play is almost enough to realise who is behind all this, as they remind you a lot of the carefully assembled Hoffenheim team that rose through the divisions during the preceding decade. And indeed, the man who built the Hoffenheim team, Ralf Rangnick, is now doing it all over again as Leipzig's (and, incidentally, Red Bull Salzburg's) director of football.

Needless to say, Rangnick is a smart man who loves football and has a great talent for teaching the way it should be played. He would never dream of hurting football, but according to the fans in Kiel's home stand and countless others across the country, that's what he's doing. It's one of the many discrepancies that hit you on this chilly Saturday by the sea, in the small stadium where Holstein have been playing football for 102 years and four months.

I guess it just proves that football is many things to many people. It's a tool for Dietrich Mateschitz, the Austrian businessman behind Red Bull. It's a livelihood for the young men in the white shirts who choose to play on while people call them “pigs.” It's the greatest of all competitive sports for Rangnick, who spends every waking hour thinking about it.

And it's much more than all that for the Kiel fans who sing, “You are destroying our game.”

http://espnfc.com/blog/_/name/bundesliga/id/557?cc=5901

[Bruce]

Just an update on the three other teams from the former East Germany now in Bundesliga 2 that were mentioned:

Aue is in 12th place in Bundesliga 2, seven points above the relegation zone.

Dynamo Dresden is in 16th place, five points from climbing out of the relegation zone. Should Dynamo remain in 16th place, they will be in a relegation playoff against a Liga 3 club for the second straight year.

Energie Cottbus is dead last, five points behind Dynamo Dresden, and facing relegation. Cottbus fired their coach this week. With a new coach, Cottbus upset Kaiserslautern 1-0 on Friday. Cottbus was in the big time Bundesliga as recently as 2009.

[Karl]

Thanks!