Dortmund’s Awful Season Takes a Turn for the Bizarre

To be a fan is to surrender. As much as the suits who run our favorite teams and leagues labor to make us feel as if we’re part of what we’re watching—Together We Make Football and all that—we are spectators. We cheer and holler and sometimes even talk to players through our televisions, which is a very different thing than being heard. What we do is ineffectual squirming more than anything. We sign up to be enthralled or disappointed depending entirely upon what some freakishly athletic folks wearing a particular color shirt can or cannot accomplish. Our role pretty much starts and ends there.

This is an extremely undesirable arrangement when your team is flailing. It’s been a hellish season for Borussia Dortmund, who are used to competing for Bundesliga titles but are currently dead last in the league table. A combination of injuries and squad discontinuity go a ways toward explaining their struggles, but not nearly all the way: Dortmund are flat-out lousy all of a sudden, for reasons that aren’t totally clear. It’s like they’re being haunted by a ghost.

This past Wednesday evening, their fans snapped. Dortmund lost at home to an Augsburg team that was playing with 10 men for the match’s final half-hour and failed to score a single goal. The Südtribüne, a stand of 24,000 supporters, is one of the great rooting sections in the world, and in recent years, they’ve had a lot to be happy about, but after the Augsburg match ended, they turned on the players, whistling and shouting and gesticulating. You don’t need to know German to understand what the crowd was saying, collectively and furiously: this is fucking bullshit.

Fans of bad teams get angry. This is not the remarkable part. What’s remarkable is that captain Mats Hummels and vice captain Roman Weidenfeller walked over to the Südtribüne and took the abuse.

What Hummels and Weidenfeller actually said to the fans—it seemed like something along the lines of calm down and we’re sorry—isn’t important. The message was in the gesture itself. Here you are, a flummoxed and aggrieved Dortmund supporter, crying out after yet another brutal loss, and the team’s captains are telling you that you are heard, that they know your pain.

This is not exactly empowering, but it is profoundly kind. Many, maybe most athletes would understandably resent a home crowd for hassling them. They would retreat into themselves and the locker room, where they could grumble in private about the ungrateful jerks in the stands. Weidenfeller and Hummels, in reaching out, are asserting that there is a pact between Dortmund’s fans and their players, and that the players aren’t holding up their end of the bargain.

This is, of course, probably not the thing that anguishes them most strongly. Professional failure stings more than a bunch of strangers being upset with you, but rooting for a sputtering team is a genuinely awful and depressive experience. It must bring some slight comfort to Dortmund fans to know that the players care on some level about their discontent.

The connections we have with our teams are both real and illusory. We feel what we feel because of what they do, and that is unshakable. But the notion that we are an integral part of this entity that can very easily persist without us is something we are sold or that we tell ourselves to meliorate the feeling of helplessness fandom can inspire.

The disquieting thing about Dortmund is that the players seem helpless. It’s like they are mere spectators, too, watching themselves founder and wondering why they can’t fix what’s wrong. There is nothing to do about this, really, besides to work hard and try to believe that what’s happening to them will eventually stop happening. In the meantime, Dortmund’s two captains have expressed that they—the fans and the players—are in the shit together. No one is pleased about it, but no one is alone, either.