Germany’s not-so-long footballing history
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| FIFA.com |
Football is steeped in tradition in Germany and the game has long enjoyed widespread popularity in the country. With four FIFA World Cup™ titles and three European Championships to their name, they are also one of the sport’s most successful nations. Indeed, it seems like football has been played in Germany for centuries, but that could not be further from the truth.
Students of the game may be familiar with terms such as Episkyros, Harpastum and Popo, which are all early descriptions of perhaps the most important invention in human history: the ball, or the football to be more precise. Objects have been kicked around since time immemorial, be it a stone or a bone, as may have been the case back in the Stone Age. Over 3,000 years ago the Chinese used animal skins stuffed with hair or feathers as a ball in a game called Tsu chu, a precursor of modern football.
The game’s roots do not go as far back as that in Germany and it was not until 29 September 1874 that the first match was played in the country - despite facing considerable resistance. The man responsible for importing it was Konrad Koch, a teacher who had lived in England for a time before returning to a secondary school in Braunschweig that year.
Resistance to the “English disease”
He was the first man to introduce the game to German schools and he also founded the first school team. Initially it was played as a version of rugby - a rugby ball was even used - and accordingly players were allowed to pick the ball up with their hands under certain circumstances. It was not until later that Germany’s football pioneer adopted the English ‘Association Football’ rules that prevented players from using their hands. Whistles and penalties would also become common features further down the line.
A year after the inaugural football match on German soil, Koch produced the game’s first rules written in the German language. “The objective of each team is to kick the ball over the crossbar of the opposition’s goal”, he wrote in his guidelines, which also mentioned the four Fs of ‘frisch, fromm, frohlich, frei’ (fresh, pious, cheerful, free) laid down by the so-called ‘father of gymnastics’ Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. The inclusion of that motto clearly indicates that Koch viewed football as a branch of gymnastics rather than as an alternative in its own right.
Yet it was the German Gymnastics Association and the gymnastics teachers’ unions who expressed some of the strongest reservations about the game, labelling it an “English disease”. That hostility inspired Koch to translate specific football terminology into German in order to help the sport take root in the country. To do so he borrowed heavily from military vocabulary, and as such terms like defence, attack, striker and penalty, among others, are still used to this day.
Koch paradox
Even the formations teams were to use were set down in Koch’s rulebook. At that time sides employed a five-man frontline, a tactic unimaginable today, and delighted in playing attacking football in a 2-3-5 line-up. Yet regardless of the rules, the game’s pioneers were convinced that football had a power to unite people, bringing rich, poor, intelligent and ill-educated together into a team that could only succeed as a collective.
Nevertheless, Koch initially had to fight against the people he wanted to help through football, as school pupils and teachers were banned from playing it for a time. However, gradually his efforts paid off and once the first German football club for youngsters was founded, clubs were soon established in Hannover and Bremen and the game’s popularity quickly spread.
Paradoxically, Koch himself was never a big football fan and disapproved of the colourful jerseys worn in England, as well as matches against foreign teams, training, large crowds of spectators and above all, professionalism.
141 years on
Walter Bensemann picked up the baton on the latter in Germany after recognising the game’s commercial potential. In 1900 he was one of the original founders of the German Football Association and shortly afterwards he launched the football magazine Kicker, which remains a respected publication today.
What happened next is universally known. Football developed into the world’s most popular sport and Germany subsequently produced countless top-class players. At the very latest it was the 1954 World Cup triumph, the Miracle of Berne, that put the black, red and gold of Germany firmly on the global footballing map.
140 years have now passed since the country staged its first match. Nobody knows what the next 141 may hold, but it seems certain that football will continue to play a huge role in Germany’s future.