Bundesliga fans have once again shown who is the boss of German football. The raft of new stadium security measures being debated by regional governments and football clubs to tackle the proliferation of insults, shouting and xenophobic incidents … during the matches, like the rain of objects on the field, ultimately resulted in nothing. After the last Conference of Presidents, a biannual meeting organized by the presidents of the Bundesländer to coordinate policies at the federal level, controversial proposals were left aside, such as the installation of video surveillance cameras with facial recognition systems pointing towards the stands or personalized entrances, assigned to a name and ID number.
There is also no question of the “Fan ID”, a sort of membership card containing the biometric data necessary to purchase tickets and which remains in the drawer. “The protest worked; “The worst measures are no longer on the table,” summarizes Thomas Kessen, of the “Unsere Kurve” supporters association, even if he does not completely claim victory and warns that it will now be necessary to “closely observe what happens next in terms of bans on stadiums and pyrotechnics”.
While it is true that the regional administrations sent almost exclusively conciliatory signals with this first decision, with the message “Dialogue instead of confrontation”, in the words of Ulrich Mäurer, Bremen Regional Minister of the Interior, it also became clear that “with the clubs and fans we have a common interest in making people feel safe in the stadium”. “The fact that civil society protests can change policy can be seen as a strong signal to society,” says Kessen. It is “a wish of all of us that politicians, from now on, once again make decisions on a verifiable basis and in dialogue with supporters, instead of acting alone”.
“We hope that politicians, from now on, will make their decisions in dialogue with supporters instead of acting alone”
Thomas Kessen
Fan association “Unsere Kurve”
The only tangible result of the conference is a strengthening of the stadium ban guidelines for people removed from the conflict and who will not be able to enter, but even this will be done in a very discreet and individual manner. The previous request to replace the decision of each stadium with a national commission remains open to be implemented in the future, but as an additional body based within the DFB which will require uniform procedures. “We create standards that work for everyone, clear rules, transparent procedures: this brings more legal certainty to everyone,” he also underlines.
The protests of recent weeks, such as the silence maintained in the stands for the first 12 minutes of the match, proved effective. Representatives of professional clubs also made it clear that they considered the stadium experience safe and warned against the “populism” of not-too-thought-out measures. They alleged, for example, the difficulty of controlling personal identification at the entrance to matches that attract tens of thousands of fans. Clubs also do not accept being held more responsible for the costs of police operations required by the closest matches.
Heidi Reichinnek, parliamentary leader of the Left Party and supporter, celebrated the conference result on Instagram and warned that anyone breaking taboos on data protection in football would soon have to do so also at concerts and demonstrations, a comment which earned her more than 40,000 likes. In a conciliatory statement, the DFL pledged that clubs would invest more money in qualifying security services, hiring more full-time security officers and significantly increasing the number of fan representatives. The desire to work more intensively on security cooperation is also evident, in accordance with the request of Hamburg Regional Interior Minister Andy Grote, who believes that “more work needs to be done on other points” and directly points to the use of pyrotechnics in the stands. Interior ministers will continue to discuss this subject in June, knowing that the season ends in May.
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