The history of German football is one that has seen many changes. Football was a popular game from early on, and the German sports landscape was dotted with hundreds of local sides. Local sports associations or clubs are a longtime feature of the culture of German athletics. Each club would participate in, and field teams from, one or more sports, depending on local interest and resources.
Early history Resident English merchants and industrialists brought football to the western Rhineland in the second half of the 19th century, alongside traditional equestrian sports. Football came to Germany from the British Isles in 1873, ten years after the FA (The Football Association) was founded, and was initially played mainly by grammar school pupils. At that time, playing sport was a privilege of the upper classes, and in the gymnastics and sports clubs, sport was primarily understood to mean group exercises aimed at harmony and discipline. The competitive sport of football, which also emphasized the individual performance of an athlete, stood in stark contrast to these ideals; it was referred to as ‘loutishness’ or ‘English disease’ and its practice was initially banned almost everywhere in the clubs.
Konrad Koch, a progressive teacher of German and classical languages at the Martino-Katharineum grammar school in Braunschweig, was the first person to succeed in dispelling the reservations about football. In 1874 Koch and his colleague August Hermann organized what is believed to be the first-ever football match in Germany, between pupils from their school Martino-Katharineum. In 1875, Koch presented the first football rules for this new game in Germany and founded the first football club in Germany at his school in the same year. Until 1893, however, the rules were still based on the variant known today as Rugby football.
According to a report in the Leipziger Zeitung in April 1874, Englishmen had founded a football club there, the Dresden English Football Club. They met regularly on Saturdays in front of the entrance to the Großer Garten, very close to today's Rudolf Harbig Stadium, and organised the game, which seemed strange to most spectators at the time. However, rugby was played in Dresden. This can be seen from an English source, which emphasizes that the Dresden Football Club was founded in October 1873 and played according to rugby rules. Hans-Peter Hock: Der Dresden Football Club und die Anfänge des Fußballs in Europa. Arete-Verlag, Hildesheim 2016, ISBN 978-3-942468-69-5, S. 15–17. The oldest evidence of football in the modern sense (association football) comes from Lüneburg. There, teacher Wilhelm Goerges and Australian-born Richard Twopenny introduced the game at the Johanneum in August 1875. Several games are documented, the first of which was also reported in the Lüneburg advertisements in September 1875.Hans-Peter Hock, Matthias Sobottka: Neues zu den Anfängen des Fußballs in Deutschland. SportZeiten 17. Jahrgang 2017, Heft 1, S. 53–71. However, the club founded at the Johanneum only existed for a short time and then fell into oblivion.
The number of footballers has grown steadily ever since. During the 1880s, the first clubs were founded in Berlin, Hamburg and Karlsruhe. Berlin was the center of German football at the time. BFC Germania 1888 from Berlin-Tempelhof was founded there in 1888. The "Bund Deutscher Fußballspieler" was also founded in Berlin in 1890 and the "Süddeutscher Fußball-Union" in 1893. The two associations almost merged at this time, but the Berliners demanded that Berlin become the permanent headquarters of the new association, which was rejected by the southern Germans.
Between 1898 and 1901, Walther Bensemann organized seven matches between German teams and French and English teams. As they were played before the establishment of the national sports association, they are not recognized as official international matches. It was not until 28 January 1900, with the inaugural meeting of the German Football Association in Leipzig, that a Germany-wide governing body was formed, with the regional associations gradually joining.
First championships and international matches
After the formation of the German Football Association, the first German championship final was held in 1903 and won by VfB Leipzig.POKALE AUF REISEN: VIKTORIA UND CO. WANDERN INS FUSSBALLMUSEUM DFB website, accessed: 27 December 2015 VfB Leipzig and others such as Britannia Berlin, Karlsruher FV, Karlsruher FC Phönix, BFC Viktoria 1889, Duisburger SpV and Holstein Kiel were the first major teams to emerge. The nascent German association permitted teams from outside the country in their new championship, as long as they were members of one of its regional associations. This is how Prague, a team from Austria-Hungary, managed an appearance in the German national final. Once the DFB joined FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) in 1904, clubs from outside the country were no longer permitted to play in Germany.
From 1903 to 1944, teams played for the Viktoria (Victoria Championship Trophy). In 1908, a cup competition named Kronprinzenpokal for the regional representative XIs was started, the trophy having been donated by Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia. The Viktoria was originally intended to be awarded, on an annual alternating basis, to the championship teams of the DFB and the nation's rugby union teams; however, football became the more dominant sport, the Rugby clubs left the federation and the trophy stayed with the DFB. Championship play skipped a year in 1904, was interrupted by World War I between 1914 and 1918, and again at the end of World War II between 1944 and 1946. The last team to win the Viktoria was Dresdner SC, who beat the air-force club Luftwaffen SV Hamburg in Berlin's Olympiastadion 4–0 to end the 1943–44 competition. In the confusion at the end of World War II, the trophy disappeared. It was re-discovered decades later in an East German bank safe-deposit box where it had been placed by a Dresden supporter for safekeeping. It has since been returned to the DFB. In the meantime, a new championship trophy, the Meisterschale ("Championship Plate"), sometimes nicknamed "die Salatschüssel" (the salad bowl), was created in 1949.
The first official international match was played on 5 April 1908. They lost 5-3 to the Swiss national team in Basel. In the early years, the German national team was not very successful. Until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the DFB team played thirty matches, winning only six. One of those six matches was played at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm - Germany beat Russia 16-0 on 1 July 1912, which remains the biggest victory for a German football team. Gottfried Fuchs scored a total of ten goals in the match - a world record that stood until 2001. The first international match after the war, against Switzerland again in Zurich on 27 June 1920, was lost 4-1.
Throughout the 1920s, the German national team continued to lose more often than it won. However, excellent football was already being played in German clubs. Franconia was a clear focus during this period, with 1. FC Nürnberg and SpVgg Fürth dominating the German topflight for almost a decade from 1920. Other successful clubs of the era included Hertha BSC and Hamburger SV, who also won several league titles and reached several finals.
In addition to the German Football Association (DFB), footballers were organized into associations, which also organized German football championships. The Arbeiter-Turn- und Sportbund (ATSB), for example, organized championships between 1919 and 1932. It even had its own national team, which played a total of 77 international matches. In 1928, the communist "Rot sport association", close to the KPD, broke away from the ATSB and organized its own championship from 1930. The bourgeois "German Gymnastics Association" also organized its own German championship between 1925 and 1930. The association then merged with the Reichssportbund, and the football teams with the DFB. There were also church associations that organized championships. The Deutsche Jugendkraft (DJK) was the sports association of the Catholic Church and organized championships on an irregular basis.
In 1919, there were 150,000 registered football players in Germany; by 1932, there were more than a million. In spite of the formation of a national association, German football held to an ideal of amateurism built around regional and local sports associations who felt that professionalism would diminish sportsmanship and local participation in the game. In the early 1930s, the DFB's president, Felix Linnemann, pushed for the creation of a professional league, or Reichsliga, in which the country's best teams would compete for the national championship. The idea was rebuffed by the regional federations dominating the sport.
German football under the Third Reich The reach of Germany's totalitarian Nazi regime stretched into social institutions at all levels, including their football leagues. Most sports and football associations were disbanded or replaced by Nazi-sponsored organisations. To join a DFB club, a player required recommendations from two non-Marxists to be permitted to play. The DFB gradually lost its independence as it was assimilated into the Deutscher Reichsausschuss für Leibesübungen (DRA) (Reich Committee for Physical Education).
Under Hans von Tschammer und Osten as Reichssportsführer, appointed by the Nazis, formerly independent sports organisations became departments of a new organisation which replaced the DRA — Deutscher Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (DRL, later NSRL or Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen). As in most of German society at the time, sports associations and football teams took part in the purge of Jews from their organisations as ordered by the regime. A few clubs, such as Alemannia Aachen and Bayern Munich, moved to support or protect their members in the face of these actions.
Football was re-organised into sixteen Gaue (DRL sub-divisions) in the Gauliga, which was in place from 1933 to 1945. The overall effect of this was positive for German football. Prior to 1933, nearly 600 clubs competed in the top flight. League re-organisation reduced this to about 170 sides and significantly raised the level of competition. This was the beginning of a process of consolidation of the myriad of small regional leagues that would culminate in a stronger, unified national league structure. The German Cup was introduced in 1935. Known initially as the Tschammerpokal, after Hans von Tschammer, the first cup winner was 1. FC Nürnberg. Play for the Tschammerpokal went on until 1943 and was not resumed again until 1953, under its new name.
The pre-war period saw a number of German sides from Saarland, Danzig and the Memel Region playing in German league and cup competitions even though the Versailles Treaty had handed those regions over to the League of Nations after the end of World War I; football-wise, they had remained within the DFB (or DRL, respectively). In post-war times, 1. FC Saarbrücken (formerly FV Saarbrücken) played in the French Second Division for one season. They won that division handily but were denied promotion to the First Division. The Saarland was to be granted its own FIFA membership until it was re-united with Germany in 1956.