Football Cities: Berlin
German football has been completely dominated by Bayern Munich in the last decade but the Bavarian city is not as big as the capital and the focus of today’s instalment, Berlin.
For a long time there was only one big club in Berlin and for most of the Bundesliga’s existence they have been the only side to appear in the top flight. That club is Hertha Berlin who were founded in 1892 before being one of the German FA’s founding members eight years later in Leipzig.
They were founded as BFC Hertha 92, taking their name from a blue and white steamship, but due to their staunch middle class fan base, the club had no real financial success until they merged with Berliner Sport-Club in 1920 to form the current iteration of the team today Hertha Berliner Sport-Club (or Hertha BSC).
Die Alte Dame (The Old Lady) won their only two German Championships in 1930 and 1931 but the closest they have come since was finishing runners up in 1975. Since the turn of the millennium there have some bright spots for Hertha with multiple qualifications for the UEFA Cup and the Champions League.
However, the best move the club has made is its heavy investment in the youth academy since 2005 with a few prospects moving into the first team including Maximilian Mittelstadt and Jordan Torunarigha. The biggest example of their heavy investment being a success though, is winning both the U19 German Championship once and the U17 German Championship twice since the big move with the teams being developed through the ranks together.
Hertha have also had some talented players in their history, with the likes of Salomon Kalou, Pal Dardai, Niko Kovac and the Boateng brothers, Jerome and Kevin-Prince Boateng. The club also has the biggest stadium in Berlin playing in the 74,000 capacity Olympiastadion, that hosts the DFB Pokal final every season.
Like we said earlier though, more recently Hertha haven’t been the only team in the Bundesliga from the capital. The other team have had somewhat of a meteoric rise to the position they’re in now, even performing better than Die Alte Dame. That club is FC Union Berlin and they come from the old East of Berlin.
The club was founded in 1906 as FC Olympia Oberschoneweide which it remained until the 1960’s. They finished runners up in the German Championship in 1923. After the second world war the club was plunged into East Berlin and it’s own league system and they spent most of their time there in the second tier.
Whilst they were there they formed a fierce rivalry with BFC Dynamo who were heavily aligned with the state whilst Union are another example of a cult club like St Pauli and Red Star Paris who do lots of charity work and are deeply rooted in the working class. This philosophy made Union the most popular club in East Berlin as they accurately reflected the mood of the area’s population.
The club’s name was changed to Union Berlin in 1966 and after the reunification of Germany in 1990 they rejoined the Bundesliga league system. They spent 11 years in the third tier being denied promotion on a few different occasions because the FA wouldn’t grant them a license due to their financial problems. In fact, the books looked so bad that on a few occasions the club was close to going out of existence.
In 2001 they finally got promoted to the 2.Bundesliga but then slipped as far as the 4th tier in 2006. By 2010 they had made it back to the second tier and then in 2019 they were promoted to the Bundesliga after they beat Stuttgart in the promotion playoff.
Last season The Iron Ones pulled off a miraculous season, finishing 7th in the league to qualify for the Europa Conference League this year. They narrowly missed out on qualifying from their group, finishing in 3rd one point behind Slavia Prague. They’re going even better in the league this season though, sitting in fourth position which if it stayed the same, would qualify them for the Champions League.
Their list of players is slightly more modest than Hertha but is a solid list with the likes of Genki Haraguchi, Taiwo Awoniyi, Rani Khedira and Robert Huth.
Since the reunification of Germany and the new bundesliga system, no team from the old East Germany has won the top flight but Union are on the right track to possibly ending Bayern’s dominance. Hertha meanwhile will be looking to reclaim their position as the best club in the capital. Either way though, Berlin’s footballing landscape is at a fascinating point and it will be interesting to see how it develops in the next few years.