Lessons from Westfalenstadion

“You cannot wear those here,” the usher said to me in German as we approached our seating ranks. My father and I quickly ditched our Dortmund scarves and climbed down the steps to our seats at Westfalenstadion, recently renamed Signal Iduna Park. The stadium is a European icon, home to the famous “Südtribune,” the “Yellow Wall” of Dortmund ultras who were desperately seeking a win in their Bundesliga campaign. It goes without saying that Westfalenstadion is a purpose-built soccer pitch designed to seat over 80,000 fans across its boxy four tribunes. I am lucky enough to have seen soccer games in New York and Dortmund and there are certainly differences between the two. 

Westfalenstadion was built to do a job—provide capacity for football fans. As far as stadiums go, it was relatively inexpensive to build. Part of that is owed to the fact that Dortmund (the club, not the city) had to pay for it. In Europe, the largest sports teams are clubs, not franchises. The difference is paramount—clubs serve the fans and their community before turning a profit. They are seen more as organizations tied to the city. Unlike franchises, when profits run dry, clubs cannot simply relocate to another city. They are organizations bound by their geography. This principal distinction allows them to sell excellent, second-tier seats for just 60 euros. Clubs control their ticket sales, but try to set their prices to be more fair than adhering to the supply-demand model. This means that tickets will sell out instantly after they’re released and that the club technically limits its own revenue. Dortmund doesn’t stand to make money off their fans. Rather, they want to provide a gameday experience that isn’t limited to rich fans arriving on business. 

This stems from the fact that the clubs and fans generally support each other in equal measure. Perhaps no greater example exists than 1. F.C. Union Berlin, a club based in one of the German capital’s eastern suburbs. In the 1990s, their stadium fell victim to its age and was later restricted from play by Germany’s football board in 2006. With the club toiling in the amateur divisions of German football, things seemed hopeless. They lacked money to redevelop their stadium and thus turned to their fans to help lift them out of ruin. With nothing to gain, over 2,300 supporters of the club helped rebuild Stadion an der Alten Försterei, literally reconstructing the foundation of the team’s home. They didn’t ask for a dime in return. They simply saw it as repaying their team and community. 

In New York, our closest comparison to Germany’s stadiums would be Red Bull Arena, located across the Hudson in New Jersey. The two franchises that play in the MLS, New York City Football Club (which, by definition, is a franchise and not a club) and New York Red Bulls, sometimes produce strong game day experiences in the Arena, but they are no match for the passion demonstrated by ultra fans in Westfalenstadion’s Nord and Südtribunes. In the Südtribune, Dortmund’s ultras jump in unison, chanting and singing songs historic to the club. Sitting in the Nordtribune, I could see them, but I could not hear them. That was because the energy shown by fans of S.C. Freiburg was simply unmatched. At the beginning of the game, Freiburg extremists lit off red and white pyrotechnics, and even as Dortmund scored goal after goal after goal, the Freiburg faithful did not quiet down. Red and white flags waved through the air and chants echoed around the grounds. In Europe, matches are noise competitions. Sometimes, when the game itself gets boring, the competition in the stands becomes the focal point. On that matchday, Dortmund handily defeated SC Freiburg 4-0 to jump to fourth place in the standings, but if you listened to the stadium in stoppage time, you would hear nothing more than proud Freiburg fans. 

Part of this energy comes from history, and part of it comes from the fact that football really is everything to these fans—Dortmund doesn’t have many other sports teams to support. But even without these two core tenets, New York City F.C. fans are developing a group of ultras for themselves. They are the vagrants of the league, playing games at Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, and Red Bull Arena as they await the completion of their purpose-built stadium in Willets Point. Despite this, the club has developed deep ties to the Hispanic communities of the Bronx. One group, The Third Rail, serves as the ultras of NYCFC. Though they occupied a lonely corner by right field when I saw them at Citi Field, the group wanted to bring the same energy and noise that was amplified by the acoustics of Westfalenstadion. 

One day, American soccer will get there. Perhaps relegation and clubs are still miles away from soccer as we play it, but the emergence of communities like The Third Rail will certainly help to capture some of the energy that has defined soccer around the world and bring it to our biggest and brightest stages.