Fear and Loathing in the Regionalliga Nord/Ost

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports Germany

Far from the bright lights of the Bundesliga, there lives another football paradise, a post-modern mashup of fallen greats, provincial towns, reserve teams, and inflated vanity projects for local big cheeses. This a land where the wind whips around your ears, where the snow blows in from Siberia onto dilapidated roofless terraces, where iron fences surround the field and tell you in no uncertain terms that this would all be easier if you just stopped coming to the game.

The quality is low, but beer prices are lower. This a place where the fanaticism of some is only matched by the complete disinterest of others. Occasionally, they even play football. This is the Regionalliga Nord/Ost, one of the five divisions that make up Germany's fourth tier.

I entered this world one Saturday in 2012 —my brother was visiting me for the first time since I moved to Berlin, and like we'd had countless times before at Rochdale FC back in England, we decided to spend a day on the beer at the football. We caught the train down to Potsdam and took in SV Babelsberg 03's uninspiring 0-0 draw with Karlsruher SC.

I never left. I still go every week.

That particular 0-0 would become the first of many. Babelsberg 03, or Babelsberg 0, as they might more accurately be known, are the world champions of tedious football. Following them, you become a connoisseur of the misplaced pass, a needless booking buff, a aficionado of goalless draws. They were then in the 3. Liga, but we had begun our inexorable slide towards the regional leagues. Draws became defeats, defeats became thrashings. After that we went into something of a decline. With a 4-0 loss at home to Wacker Burghausen, Babelsberg's tenure in the 3. Liga was up, and we entered into the wild, wild East of the RL Nord/Ost.

The football at Babelsberg, of course, was dreadful. I stayed for the community, the atmosphere, the singing and the noise. It turned out that most of my fellow supporters felt the same. The club knocked a euro off the ticket price, got a better beer supplier for the stadium, and our attendance actually increased. In the Regionalliga, logic doesn't apply. Most fans were happy that we were relegated, or at least not angry about it. The 3. Liga meant national travel, away games at Karlsruhe on the French border, Burghausen on the Austrian and Aachen on the Dutch. Whole weekends spent away, watching a perennially-defeated team. In the RL Nord/Ost, we would have local derbies, games with Magdeburg and Union and Hertha (or at least their reserve teams), clubs we loved to hate and who hated us. We would lose our better players, but we would get new ones. So long as we kept Sülo, we thought, we might even win a game or two.

Sülo — Süleyman Koç to his mother — is central to the story of the RL Nord/Ost, or at least to Babelsberg's time in it. He was our star. A star of sorts, for he didn't really love us as we loved him. His love for us was one of convenience, the convenience being all ours. Our beloved Sülo spent his days as a professional footballer, his nights as a prisoner, locked up in the Moabit nick for driving the getaway car in a Neukölln armed robbery. Not good enough, or at least, not reliable enough for the big two in Berlin, we were the next best thing. He carried us, smashing in eight goals before Christmas.

"Süleymani, jetzt oder nie!" ("Süleymani, now or never!") we would sing as the players came over after a win. When his parole came up during the winter break, 'never' was the answer, and Sülo moved to Paderborn. Without him, we were bereft. In the first game back, our players took the ball and looked up to the right-wing, only to find him absent. We stumbled to a goalless draw with Zwickau. That sinking feeling set in again. Sülo, like all the better players, made his escape whilst he still could. For us it wouldn't be so easy.

Here we have to take a step back and bring the uninitiated up to speed with the minutiae of crap German football. I promise it's interesting, or least, that it's relevant. The 3. Liga is the last fully-professional tier, and beneath those lucky 18 clubs lie the regional leagues, where 88 teams compete across 5 divisions for just 3 promotion spots. The effect this has on the average team is that promotion is near impossible, and, because of the financial insecurities at this level, one team can usually be counted on to go bust (Hi, VFC Plauen!) or otherwise totally collapse (What's up, Union II!). Thus the regional leagues represent a footballing purgatory, a lower-league limbo, where stagnation is guaranteed and investment pointless.

With nothing going on of interest on the field — which, after three seasons following Babelsberg, I can assure you is the norm — fans are left to create their own entertainment, and this is where the Regionalliga really loses its mind. The hardcore fans, who keep coming regardless of the spectacle on the field, rule everything. Without them, there is no league, and everyone knows it. Their power to bring in revenue for clubs makes them near untouchable. Magdeburg, Babelsberg, Jena and BFC Dynamo can pull thousands of fans onto the Kurve, most of whom are present for reasons other than the football. At best, they're there for the atmosphere and singing, but this being the Regionalliga Nord/Ost, where all but a few West Berlin teams are from the Neue Länder, far-right politics are never far away.

Before Babelsberg had even started the season in the RL Nord/Ost — literally minutes before — we were welcomed to the world of regional East German football. Our opponents, 1.FC Lok Leipzig, stormed over the fences of the away end and towards us. Babelsberg, whose fan-scene grew out of the occupied houses and squats of post-Wende Potsdam, strongly identify to the left of the political spectrum — we play in the Karl-Liebknecht Stadion on Karl-Liebknecht Straße for Christ's sakes — and our new friends were here to tell us that it wasn't going to be that simple down in the 4. Liga. They got as far as our fences, where we fought to keep them at bay. "Wir sind Lokisten" they sang, "Mörder und Faschisten" ("We are Lokisten, murderers and fascists". On their fence they hung a banner reading "Justice for Anders Breivik." We beat them 1-0; Sülo Koç scored.

The RL Nord-Ost is Ost with a capital O. It fulfils the stereotypes of the former East and its football. Everything from the light-hearted — an above average level of stone-washed blue jeans and shit trainers on the terraces, hilarious schlager club anthems — to the more sinister, like fan violence and the aforementioned far-right politics.

On the field, we can see the first evidence. In the days of the DDR, East German teams competed at a European level — BFC Dynamo and Lok Leipzig all reached the semi-finals of the Cup Winners' Cup, Carl Zeiss Jena went one further and reached the final in 1981, 1. FC Magdeburg actually won it in 1974 with a team that boasted Jürgen Sparwasser, scorer of the only goal when DDR beat the FDR at that year's World Cup. All four now lounge in the RL Nord-Ost, save Lok, relegated on the final day of last season.

Off the field as well, Magdeburg have fared best of these four, but really only relatively. They drew 16,000 fans for a Spitzenspiel with Zwickau in March, a classic containing all the trademarks of the RL-Nord/Ost, in the sense that it ended 0-0, and included a huge fight between local hooligans and the cops. This sort of thing is par for the course with 1. FCM, and this level in general. Their game with Babelsberg last year was stopped twice for pitch invasions and pyrotechnics from both sides. The ref called the Magdeburg manager onto the field to address their fans in an attempt to calm them down. It didn't work. After Babelsberg equalised to make it 2-2, their fans stormed the field and fought the cops. After a 20-minute delay, the game restarted, and a minute after that, the captains were called over and took a gentleman's agreement to end it at 2-2. The game clock stood at 85 minutes, but we'd all seen enough. This season's fixture was quieter, but still involved fireworks being thrown into the Babelsberg end.

1.FCM have their troubles, but compared to BFC Dynamo, they're basically angels. To say that BFC Dynamo are the most hated club in Germany downplays how hated they are. They were champions of the DDR-Liga for 10 consecutive seasons in the '80s, though that wasn't difficult given that Stasi chief Erich Mielke was their president, ensuring players were funnelled into East Berlin and referees cajoled into giving Dynamo decisions. When the wall fell, they swiftly changed their names to FC Berlin and denounced the Dynamo days, but began to attract a following of similarly unpleasant types, in the form of neo-Nazis. As attendances dwindled, the team dropped through the divisions and went bankrupt, before re-emerging again as Dynamo, complete with stars on their shirt signifying the number of titles they had "won".

Their fans are best mates with the previously-mentioned bunch from Lok Leipzig, as well as Lazio of Rome, or Nazio, as they're known. They visited us in Babelsberg a few weeks ago — a fan was stabbed at the train station, and we were greeted with Nazi salutes and chants of "Arbeit Macht Frei - Babelsberg 03". It's painfully common at this level. I could go on all day about these incidents — Zwickau are also known for this shit — or even about the cops, who take out their frustration at being sent to watch dreck like Babelsberg by whipping out the batons and pepper spray whenever they get the chance, but you get the picture.

In the Regionalliga Nord/Ost, nobody can hear you scream.

It isn't all like that though. RL Nord/Ost is bipolar, when one becomes accustomed to the differences between the derbies and the dirge. To put the size of some of the teams into perspective, three clubs — VFB Auerbach, ZFC Meuselwitz, TSG Neustrelitz — represent towns with populations that could fit into the MECC-Arena, Magdeburg's stadium. FSV Budissa Bautzen came to the Karl-Liebknecht-Stadion with a grand total of six away supporters. FC Viktoria had none. The transitory nature of players and the poor quality of play means that a team with heart and enthusiasm can go a long way, with whoever wants the victory most usually getting it. Against the teams with no fans, apathy sets in fairly quickly, and games can meander without incident. For those of us stumping up our hard-earned to get in, the result and the performance becomes secondary to the experience. This brings us to Friday night and FC Viktoria.

Cult indie band and lower-league football aficionados Half Man Half Biscuit released a track called "Friday Night and the Gates are Low", a rant against the modern predilection towards Friday evening kick-offs. But on a balmy evening after a week at work, I can't think of a better way to spend the dregs of a day. The sun shone, the beer flowed, the songs were sung. It finished 0-0, of course, our 10th draw of the season. The ref blew full time after 87 minutes, but like the Pixies said, you need the quiet to appreciate the loud. As the players trudged over to salute the hardcore in the Nordkurve, a banner came over the fence. "Holt den Derbysieg!" (Holt win the derby) — referring to our upcoming Brandenburger Landes-Pokal semi-final with Cottbus. In the RL-Nord/Ost, the next derby is always just around the corner.