Hoffenheim Ultras

Ah, Hoffenheim. Rich stepchild of the Bundesliga. Not really accepted and definitely not loved as one’s own.

Ironic, because the fact is, Hoffenheim is closer to the roots of the small amateur football clubs that you find in every agile age group of each gender in every nook and cranny of this land. Its heart, that is, its fans really do come predominately from villages and towns between Mannheim and the far northern suburbs of Stuttgart.

The largest city in its direct sphere of influence is Heidelberg with a population of only 160,000, many of whom wouldn’t deign to watch football because where’s the intellectual challenge for Professor and Frau Doktor? Many Hoffenheim attendees are actually Stuttgart fans but condescend to grace the upstarts with their presence, at least until Stuttgart moves up in the table and cheap tickets are available to see them.

I remember when I first moved to Germany many years ago, by chance I encountered on the streets near the train station in Düsseldorf a chanting, roaring horde of burly men fast descending upon me, preceded by a phalanx of inexplicably smiling policemen. They were football fans. I was terrified.

On later occasions as I again encountered similar packs of young men bedecked with their flags and shirts and scarves, bellowing at full drunken volume in the echo chambers of train stations, I was no less frightened. One always stops and gives the swaggering, hostile pack free passage, police included. Hail the so-called “Ultras”. Nothing, but nothing, takes precedence over their football club.

When you go to a Hoffenheim game, you definitely get the feeling that this is a different crowd from other Bundesliga teams. Apart from Dietmar Hopp, Hoffenheim VIPs are, for example, the Oberbürgermeister of Sinsheim (pop. 35,392). Bayern München schickeria would have a very hard time fitting in here, as would the Ultras of other “traditional” (read: macho) clubs.

A Hoffenheim Ultra, as far as I can tell from attendance at games, is a 12-year-old boy drinking a Coke and wearing a Hoffenheim shirt, accompanied by mother or father or both, who don’t hesitate to reprimand him for putting too much sauce on his French fries. If he uses swear words at all – and surely not in the presence of said parents – it’s usually in a completely wrong context and ends up having the opposite of the intended effect. It could be that nothing is more important to him, also, than his football team but his range of expression about it is endearingly more limited.

Or maybe a Hoffenheim Ultra is the approximately 60-year-old woman wearing a Hoffenheim scarf who waits at the S-Bahn station in Heidelberg Weststadt/Südstadt to take the early train to every home game. When the team disappoints, she just sadly shakes her head as if saying, “Boys, boys, boys, how could you do that?”

Of course the majority of Hoffenheim fans fits the profile of young adult males between 18 and 40, like everywhere else in the Bundesliga. But I’ve never heard of Hoffenheim fans rampaging in Meckesheim Bahnhof – or anywhere else they come from, for that matter. And even if they did, how would you know? There was hardly anything there to begin with – just a few folks kicking a football.