Kathleen Krüger, the only female manager in the men’s Bundesliga

Pictures for Säbener 51

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DFB-President Keller Seeks Out Conflict -- Peace in the boxes, war against fan curves

Fritz Keller should have been the embodiment of change at the DFB. However, his strange appearance in “Sportstudio” damages his image as beacon of hope, who acts ignorantly in cases of racism and affronts active fans in a way out-of-touch with reality.

Club Nr. 12 Statement on the Events in Sinsheim:

Club Nr. 12 sees itself as the unity of all active Bayern fans. In this position for the sake of completeness again: Club Nr. 12 distances itself from every form of racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination.

The optical actions of Club Nr. 12 were limited to the choreography for the 120th birthday at yesterday's away match. The displayed banners were not from Club Nr. 12. Club Nr. 12 distances itself from the displayed insults.

The resulting reactions ("ugly face of football", "Day X", etc) however are exaggerated and unbelievable. At every match in the Bundesliga and also elsewhere, banners are displayed. Often unfortunately with insulting contents. Also many stadiumgoers' personal opinions are not infrequently displayed through insults. Such insults are accepted in football as apparent and are present at almost every football match (ex: Timo Werner is often called a Hurensohn in song, BVB-Hurensöhne sounds almost every match day).

Naturally, that's not a free ticket for every kind of insult, but it is important for full consideration. From our standpoint, it should be asked further for what reasons insults against a single person are turned into examples as the DFB itself has re-instated raised collective punishments again since a few months ago (Dortmund fans are banned from Hoffenheim for a minimum of two years).

Particularly in the last few weeks, there have been enough racist and sexist instances in German football stadiums, where an example could have been made. Think about the insults against Torunarigha at the DFB-Pokal Schalke v Hertha or Kwadwo in Münster. In both cases, however, there were no breaks in play, in Schalke not even a stadium announcement. But when it's about a patron whose business incidentally is also an important financial partner of the DFB, a boundary has been crossed.

If the DFB and DFL treat every instance of discriminating, insulting, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, or sexist statements with the same consequences in the future, then yesterday -- combined with the fantastic football our team played for the first 75 minutes -- would have a continuing positive affect. (X)

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