Bundesliga: Your complete guide to becoming a football fan in Germany

[H O L D F I R E 流]

 

If you're not following Germany's top football league, you're missing out on a big part of Deutsche Kultur.

Follow our seven-step guide to find a German club that will get you cheering. If you’re a football fan, living in Germany presents the chance to live not only in another country, but to be a part of another football culture. And as an American, it’s the chance for me to experience a top-flight men's football league.

(The US has terrific women’s football, thank you.) Now's the perfect time to dig in, as the new Bundesliga (as the German league is known) season kicked off last weekend and will stretch on through May. Will Bayern Munich win an eighth consecutive title? Alas, Berlin, where I’m living, doesn’t really feel like a football mecca -- though this season will test that. For the first time since 1977, this year will bring a Berlin derby to the Bundesliga, as league regulars Hertha Berlin take on upstarts FC Union Berlin in their first-ever run in the top division.

(A few years ago, Berliner Morgenpost put out a map showing where Hertha members and Union members live. It looks rather like a map of the Berlin Wall.) Before coming here, I knew a few things about German football: the successes of its national team, the perennial dominance of Bayern Munich, the Bundesliga’s low ticket prices and teams’ ownership by their fans. And as an Arsenal supporter, I’ve cheered on German players like Mesut Özil and Lukas Podolski. But now that I’m here in the land of Bundesliga, I want to go deeper. Here’s my plan. Read up on the history. I’ve just finished reading Tor! The Story of German Football by Uli Hesse, and I can’t recommend it more highly. I’ve been regaling friends who have little interest in football with anecdotes and history from this book for the past week, and I don’t intend to stop anytime soon. Hesse artfully tells the tale of football in Germany as it collides with the country’s political history time and again. If you want to know what the Bundesliga’s storied clubs were doing during the Nazi era or the Cold War, or how Germany won the 1954 World Cup almost a decade before it had a national professional football league, or why German clubs have odd names, read this book. Pick a team to follow. A good bet is the team that’s closest to where you live. But you’ll also want to read up on the history of the team and see if their story is one you’re into, and talk to Germans about what the team represents to them. For instance, BFC Dynamo in Berlin now plays in a regional league, but they were associated with the Stasi when they played in the GDR’s top-level Oberliga. One contentious club is RB Leipzig, the team that has rocketed to the Bundesliga from the fifth tier just a few years ago. But this has been accomplished with big money from energy drink company Red Bull, and many see the team’s corporate-funded ascent as a threat to the long-standing character of German football.