How Football Got Started in Germany

In April 2021, Pitch Publishing released my first book, Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World. It’s a country-by-country account of how the game got started in rough chronological order from the very first kick up to the first World Cup in 1930, by which time the game was truly global. I have a long chapter on Germany, one of the first continental countries to adopt football. This is the abridged version based on an article I wrote for Halb Vier at the time of release.

In the late 19^th century, there were typically two ways in which Association rules football left Britain and became introduced to other countries; by British merchants and ex-pats taking their sports abroad with them, or by students returning to their homeland from British schools with a ball in hand having caught the bug. 

In Germany’s case, it was a bit of both. At this point, there was a strong cultural and economic exchange between Great Britain and Germany, and Queen Victoria had married the German Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

In Dresden, as early as April 1874, ‘Dresden Football Club’, made up of mostly English players with a president named ‘Reverend Bowden’, was kicking a ball around the city’s famous Großer Garten. Sometimes, they drew hundreds of curious locals to watch.

In Braunschweig later the same year, teacher August Hermann confused his students at the Martino-Katherineum school with a leather ball, which was almost egg-shaped. They didn’t quite know what to do with it. Hermann had ordered the ball from London, where his sister often travelled with her job. At the time, Germany’s main sport was Turnen – group gymnastics, based on improving health and physique. One of Hermann’s colleagues, Konrad Koch, took on the task of educating the boys how to play, but football was the antithesis of the sedate Turnen, and came with contact and injuries. 

It didn’t take long for polite German society to associate the term ‘the English disease’ with football…and not for the last time. Koch’s struggles to introduce football into stern Germanic society were celebrated in the 2011 film, Der ganz große Traum (Lessons of a Dream). Think Dead Poets’ Society – with its inspirational teacher with his new ideas upsetting the authorities – meets The English Game.

Turnen is also the reason so many German football clubs seem to have dates older than when football was actually played in the country. Football became another arm in already-multi-sport clubs and became the dominant force. For example, Munich 1860, which didn’t play football until the turn of the 20^th century.

Germany’s oldest football clubs

There must have been a wider football culture in Germany around the time of Koch, Hermann and the Dresden Football Club, because the Oxford University football team toured the country in 1875.

Hamburger SV draws a link back to 1887 as its year of foundation. However, the current club was founded by the merger of three clubs – SC Germania, FC Falke Eppendorf and Hamburger FC – in June 1919. The oldest German club still in existence is the Berliner Fußball Club (BFC) Germania 1888, which plays near the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. 

BFC Germania plays in Berlin’s Kriesliga B league – the tenth tier of German football. Despite being the original Berlin club, it has long been surpassed by Hertha Berlin, 1. FC Union Berlin, Tennis Borussia, BFC Dynamo and another of Germany’s oldest clubs, FC Viktoria 1889 Berlin.

Berlin – in particular the Tempelhofer Feld as an open, public space – was a key hub of Germany’s early football scene. BFC Germania was founded on 15 April 1888 by 17-year-old Paul Jestram, his three brothers and their friends from the Ashkanischen Gymnasium. 

In 1890, BFC Germania joined the new German Footballers’ Union (Bund Deutscher Fußballspieler – BDF) and pioneered cup competitions in the Berlin area.Disagreements emerged in the BDF over the involvement of overseas players – mainly British – in competition and administration. A rival organisation – the Deutscher Fußball und Cricket Bund (German Football and Cricket Federation) arose from the disagreement to include non-German teams and players, and ran its first eight-team championship in 1891-92.

Football was gaining prominence in the German capital, with the English Football Club of Berlin hosting the Dresden Football Club in April 1892 in front of the British ambassador and the German Minister of Public Instruction. Three months later, Hertha Berliner Sport-Club, now the capital’s premier football club, was founded.

‘Germany’ arrives in England

On the morning of 1 September 1896, a team of German footballers landed at Queenborough in Kent, England, from the Netherlands. That evening, they took on local side Sheppey United of the Southern League.

The Kentish team ran out 9-0 victors. The tour did not get any easier for the visitors either, as they lost 15-0 to Chatham and 9-0 again to Millwall. The Germans rounded off their four-match tour with a 13-0 trouncing against an XI at Crystal Palace that included England internationals and members of Corinthian FC, the leading English amateur side. G.O. Smith scored a double-hat-trick.

The British press described the visiting players as “representatives of the German Football Association”, however, the creation of the Deutcher Fußball-Bund (DFB) was still four years away. Indeed, the German press was furious that such a weak side could claim to represent the country. Sporting Life quoted an editorial in German publication Spiel und Sport, which lamented the “cool cheek” of the side to “pass itself of as representing the German Football Association” and claimed no one in German football circles seemed to know the team.

The fact that no single national organisation came to represent German football until 1900 – a quarter of century after the game had first been introduced to the nation – is testament to the country’s size and also indicates how regionalised German football was early development.

The German game takes off

While the unofficial German team that toured England in 1896 were drawn from the north-west, chiefly Duisburg, Bremen and Aachen, the game was also growing in the south. In 1899, Walther Bensemann – who would go on found the influential Kicker magazine, introduce Germanified football expressions, and even established a couple of clubs – organised a tour of English professionals. The Englishmen rounded off a successful four match tour by defeating a combined German and Austrian XI 7-0 at Karlsruhe. 

A year later, with Bensemann present, the DFB was founded at a meeting of club representatives in Leipzig. The foundation of the DFB was a key moment in advancing the respectability of football in Germany and was a catalyst for its growth. It gave the sport structure, authority and, finally, its first national competition.

VfB Leipzig – now 1. Lokomotive Leipzig – was the inaugural winner of the German Football Championship in 1903. VfB Leipzig beat DFC Prag of Prague, where there was a large German community, 7-2 in the final held at Altona 93’s ground in Hamburg.

On 21 May 1904, the DFB joined the new Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) by telegram and, in the same year, Corinthian FC toured Germany. 

British coaches, such as Steve Bloomer, Fred Pentland and Jimmy Hogan, headed to Germany and Austria to help the game grow but the First World War was to intervene. After the war, social change would lead to football becoming more widely adopted, although England and the other Home Nations were resistant to engaging German sides. 

It was not until 10 May 1930 that a full international would take play between Germany and England, with the sides drawing 3-3 in Berlin.

For more on the roots of German football, please pick up a copy of Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World. And if you’re interested in anti-fascist activity during the Third Reich era and in modern-day Germany, please order my second book, The Defiant: A History of Football Against Fascism. And if you happen to be in Berlin during the Euros, I recommend checking out Jonny Whitlam’s football walking tours.