Yes, Politics Do Belong in Sports
FC St. Pauli isn't Germany's best football club, but its resistance to commercialization has earned it a mass following around the world. Resisting the call to "keep politics out of sports," its fans insist that what sports really need protecting from is the pervasive power of money.
FC St. Pauli players celebrate after scoring during the Second Bundesliga match between FC St. Pauli and FC Heidenheim at Millerntor-Stadion on September 27, 2020 in Hamburg, Germany. (Cathrin Mueller / Getty Images)
In any list of clubs that have transcended national boundaries in the sport’s mediatized, globalized new era, FC St. Pauli of Hamburg is rather an anomaly. It has never won a major national league or cup, nor qualified for European competitions. It has never managed more than a few seasons at a time in Germany’s highest division, the Bundesliga, and has spent most of the last twenty years in the lesser 2. Bundesliga or Regionalliga Nord. On the two occasions when it did get promoted to the topflight, in 2001 and 2010, it went straight back down again.
Nonetheless, as Carles Viñas and Natxo Parra tell us in their new book St. Pauli: Another Football Is Possible (Pluto Press), this is more than just another second-flight club. Not only does St. Pauli regularly pack out its 29,000-capacity Millerntor-Stadion, but it has eleven million fans worldwide, with supporters’ clubs in the UK, France, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere. Its skull and crossbones logo has become a countercultural icon. But if St. Pauli has nothing like the international success or TV exposure of Liverpool, Manchester United, Barcelona, or Real Madrid, what explains its fame?
Industrial Origins
Viñas and Parra tell the club’s story from its beginning in 1899 as the footballing division of Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein 1862 — one of the gymnastics organizations popular in the militaristic states that formed a united Germany in 1871. Forming a separate football club in 1924, St. Pauli drew support from the industrial workers who had turned St. Pauli, a port district in southern Hamburg, into a left-wing stronghold. This contrasted with the city’s more bourgeois, nationalistic north, which eventually provided the base for the club’s far more successful rivals, Hamburger SV. FC St. Pauli first appeared at the top level in 1934, in the Gauliga Nordmark — one of sixteen regional leagues created in the reorganization of German football after the Nazis came to power.
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