The Athletic is attending some of the most ferocious derbies across Europe, charting the history of the continent’s most deep-rooted and volatile rivalries. The series opened in Greece with the Derby of the Eternal Enemies, then the Old Firm in Scotland and Le Classique in France.
We visited Liverpool as they welcomed Manchester United to Anfield, were in Belgrade for the Eternal Derby and Italy for Derby della Capitale, and watched Ajax take on Feyenoord in De Klassieker.
Now to northern Germany and the city divide that is Hamburg’s Stadtderby.
Hamburg is all sorts of things.
It is the charred remains of St Nicholas and the red-brick, canal lattice of its Speicherstadt. It is the undulating glass of its symphony hall and the harbour that opens out to the world. Hamburg has its marble floors, its glassy lakes and its rustling trees. But it has its broken glass, its red brick and its flashing neon too. It is a muddle of different ideas and styles; a jigsaw of the changing times.
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Hamburg is today, yesterday and tomorrow. It is serene, sometimes seedy. Delicately perfumed, but dripping in sweat.
It has had to be resilient. It was ravaged by fire in the 19th century and then decimated by Allied bombing during the Second World War. It has been burnt down, bombed out, reimagined and rebuilt. It is Germany’s second city and one of the country’s great survivors. It is also home to Hamburger Sport-Verein and FC St Pauli. Two clubs that contrast in every possible way and the two unequal halves of the Stadtderby.
Friday is the most beautiful day. One of those afternoons when the spring sun butters buildings and warms the gentle breeze.
Around the Binnenalster, the tourist-trap lake lined by glass-fronted stores and coffee shops selling €5 lattes, St Pauli fans crack beers in the sun and sing by the water’s edge. On the streets behind them, police vans assemble — 10, 15, 20 of them – all lined up in a row. Below ground, a column of officers stomp the corridors of a nearby station, as fans from both teams start to drift down the platforms, onto the trains and out of the city.
The Volksparkstadion is to the north west — a great boiling pot of a ground that holds 57,000 people. It is 20 minutes down the S-Bahn tracks and then a long walk from the station, down a pathway that first drops under bridges and then rises up past stickered lampposts, ticket touts and frying food. It winds on into the park from which the stadium takes its name; past trees, murals and, on matchdays, small battalions of riot police, glaring with distrust.
The stadium is vast. It sits on raised ground and looms over anyone who approaches. Walk around on a non-matchday and it will show you HSV’s past. The cast of Uwe Seeler’s foot sits at the foot of the hill. Portraits of Kevin Keegan have been sprayed on the perimeter walls and inside the concourse. Hermann Rieger, the club’s physio for nearly 30 years and a cult hero, is cast in bronze.
Inside the ground, and with kick-off approaching, the red and blue flares are lit behind the goal, sending smoke billowing out of the stands. At the St Pauli end, dozens of Roman candles spark to life and fog cascades down the tiers, creeping out over the pitch.
Pyrotechnics are banned, says a voice over the tannoy.
The ultras light more. Then more again.
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Soon, everything has disappeared, leaving nothing but the smell of the gunpowder, the scratchy howl of the capos’ megaphones, and the sound of the fans thundering away at each other from within the haze.
The Volkspark is full and there is not an inch of space on any of its terraces. With the players in the tunnel and the whole stadium’s weight bearing down from above, the Nordkurve unfurls a vast tifo, surrounded on all sides by the HSV tricolour. It must have taken weeks to plan and prepare — hundreds of hours to make — and it is unfurled for just a few seconds.
It is breathtaking. The heyday of HSV’s past may be a long time ago, but their present still has plenty of gravity.
This Stadtderby has loomed for both teams for a while, gaining importance each week.
Tim Walter’s HSV are making their fifth attempt to climb out of Bundesliga 2. Last season, they lost a traumatising relegation play-off against Hertha Berlin. With an array of dysfunctional powerhouses floundering in the division above, they would do anything to avoid enduring that jeopardy again.
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Before kick-off, Heidenheim and Darmstadt occupied the automatic places above them, and St Pauli were immediately below, just six points behind. Before the World Cup, St Pauli had been above the relegation places on goal difference alone. Head coach Timo Schultz was sacked and his 29-year-old assistant, Fabian Hurzeler, was appointed as his replacement, becoming the youngest head coach in the top three divisions.
Remarkably, Hurzeler’s St Pauli promptly won 10 games in a row. Though that streak was ended by a 2-1 defeat to Eintracht Braunschweig the previous week, they arrived at the Volksparkstadion in fourth place and not with just a faint hope of promotion themselves, but the chance to gain it at the expense of their city rivals.
That rivalry is a curious one.
HSV and St Pauli have rarely been in the same division. This run of games since HSV’s relegation in 2018 has created familiarity but, before Friday night, the two had contested just 25 league matches since the Bundesliga era began in 1963. St Pauli have spent just seven seasons in the top flight and only two since the turn of the century. HSV are six-time German champions and a former European Cup winner. In footballing terms — and in almost every conceivable way — they belong in different orbits.
The city’s fan geography is simpler. The River Elbe runs inland from the sea and into the heart of Hamburg. The quarter of St Pauli sits to its north and is home to just over 20,000 people. That is where the club’s support is most concentrated, in St Pauli itself and its neighbouring districts. Everywhere else is painted with the blue, black and white of HSV. On walls, bridges, buses and trains, and almost any other surface that can be sprayed or stickered.
St Pauli may have a presence in all parts, but they are dominated everywhere other than in their own enclave.
The irony of that is that St Pauli’s transcendent fame is likely greater.
Even people with no interest in football know of their left-wing politics, their community and social causes and their pirate flag. They know the Reeperbahn, too, the city’s notorious red light district that is often used as a synonym for what the club represents.
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It is a seductive tale, but St Pauli’s rebellious heart really comes from more than one place. Among those, Hafenstrasse is more important. The street itself runs right along the northern bank of the Elbe and it was there, at the beginning of the 1980s, that social conflict helped turn just another football club into what, today, is something else entirely.
In 1981, a dozen of the houses in the area were squatted. Over the next decade and beyond, those residents — students, punks, autonomists, activists and those rejecting societal orthodoxies — waged a fierce battle with the city and a police force intent on forcing their eviction. At times, Hafenstrasse was almost a combat zone, with periodic battles between the residents on the roofs and the police down on the streets.
The squatters prevailed. Their victory was significant enough to make the New York Times and to become a cultural reference point well beyond Hamburg and Germany. Even today, with its rainbow walls, its dashes of expression, and a fence made out of broken old bicycle parts, it remains one of the most famous squats in the world.
Its place in St Pauli lore is relatively simple. Hafenstrasse is just a short walk from the Millerntor-Stadion, St Pauli’s 29,500-capacity ground, and during the mid-1980s, some of the residents found their way in. One of the symbols of the occupation had also been the Totenkopf, the skull and crossbones flags, and legend has it that a punk named Doc Mabuse took one along to the football and flew it from the terrace.
St Pauli’s evolution into a cult club has more stages, but the mood of Hafenstrasse remains at their root today. Approach the area from the east and a stencilled message on the side of one of the buildings can be seen from hundreds of yards it away.
“Kein mensch ist illegal.” No person is illegal, it reads, as do thousands of St Pauli stickers that decorate the lampposts and bins in the quarter and far out into Hamburg’s suburbs, each of them endorsed with the now iconic Totenkopf.
St Pauli start fast.
Early in the first half, Dapo Afolayan slaloms through the home defence and whips a shot inside the far post. Hurzeler and his substitutes spray out from their bench in celebration as Afolayan wheels away, only to see the referee’s hand raised and his season’s finest moment denied.
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Hurzeler howls with injustice. Walter, his face like a clenched fist, scowls from his technical area, glaring at anyone who dares look back.
Nine minutes before the interval, St Pauli do break through. Lukas Daschner drops deep, cuts open HSV’s defence with a pass around the corner, and wing-back Manolis Saliakas is in at the back post to drill home, leaving Daniel Heuer Fernandes flat on his back. This time it counts. Saliakas cups his ears to the home fans, then runs 60 yards to jump into his coach’s arms.
“HAH… ES… FOW!
HAH… ES… FOW!
HAH… ES… FOW!”
The response is immediate, but fools nobody. The Volkspark is quivering with neuroses again. It is thinking about all of its yesterdays — about that loss to Hertha Berlin, about having to spend a sixth year down in this league and about how much the rest of Germany will laugh at them for that. Back into that hall of mirrors they go and, briefly, they look terrified.
And then centre-back Jonas David pierces the gloom. David has only played as much as he has this season because Mario Vuskovic tested positive for EPO, a prohibited substance, back in the autumn and is now banned for the next two years. David has cost HSV points this season. He is 23 and raw, still learning his position, but he steps forward a minute before half-time and sends a hissing 30-yarder crashing into the top corner.
It is a wonderful goal. A ‘traumtor’, a dream goal — the kind he will never score again. The Volkspark shudders with ungodly noise. It is a celebration without syllables; a whole bar of indecipherable notes.
1-1 at half-time. The Hamburg derby is a passion play.
The existence of a left-wing club in one part of the city implies a right-wing team in the other. That would make for a compelling narrative but it is not really the case. HSV are too big to have that kind of definition.
They are the city’s team and Hamburg is a mess of contradictions. It is northern and hard-working; it has progressiveness in its veins. At the same time, its white marble and supply of millionaires give it a decadent streak. Hamburg is home to all kinds of people. Its biggest football club is, too. If St Pauli is a church, then HSV are a giant marquee under which everybody crams.
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In the 1980s, some of the loudest voices within that scrum were among the worst. During that decade, German football suffered as hooligan firms became more visible on terraces and right-wing behaviour rose sharply. In Tor! The Story of German Football, the author and journalist Uli Hesse described the scene at his own club, Borussia Dortmund.
“The thing I remember most vividly about the early-to-mid-1980s is feeling completely lost, standing on a half-empty terrace, a group of about 50 neo-Nazi thugs goose-stepping around and waiting for the police to arrive to get the action going, with some drab game trying to develop on the pitch below.”
It is about as far from the modern image of German football as possible. And yet, with West Germany in the grip of recession at that time and disaffected youth in stadiums easy prey for far-right groups, it was far from a localised problem.
“Every bigger club had a notorious firm,” Hesse tells The Athletic. “Usually, almost without exception, they were right-wing fans.”
In an early issue of The Blizzard magazine, he also interviewed a former HSV supporter who switched clubs to St Pauli in response to the far-right presence in the Volkspark and that, too, creates the lingering perception of political rivalry. Especially because it was not an isolated incident.
But while St Pauli are devoutly and proudly left-wing, HSV are apolitical. Like clubs such as Dortmund and Schalke, their crowds have such a scale that no one group has any prominence. The only real commonality is the team — although even that has fragmented in recent years.
In 2018, the cornerstone of HSV’s self-image disappeared.
Having spent almost a decade circling the Bundesliga drain, they finally disappeared down the plughole. They were the last of the 16 original members to be relegated and with their demotion, the famous clock that had been commemorating their 55-year stay stopped ticking.
They were only ‘Der Dino’, the dinosaur, in the abstract from that moment. The greater cost, however, has been a deepening existential crisis: What are Hamburger SV today? More importantly, who are they?
“One of Hamburg’s problems today is actually finding that one identity,” Hesse says. “They’re no longer the salt of the Bundesliga earth. They don’t have the famous clock in the stadium anymore. It seems to me that there are so many different factions within the club. I don’t mean warring factions, but groups in terms of identity.”
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When the players return from half-time, the supporters load their cannons.
A pillar of blue, black and white rises from the Nordkurve, as fireworks whistle out of the stand and burst in the early evening. No pyrotechnics, please, cautions the PA, before a round of rockets scream from the St Pauli end and explode over the pitch. The referee calls the goalkeepers away from their nets and waits for the ultras to exhaust their arsenals. The Volkspark is thick with fog once again and the players stretch and twist as they wait for the clouds to lift.
When they finally do, HSV are different; they are urgent.
Within minutes of the restart, captain Sebastian Schonlau sends a tame cross into the area. Every St Pauli defender leaves or misses it and there, at the back post, is Bakery Jatta to steer the hosts into the lead.
Jatta has had an unimaginably difficult few years. He arrived in Germany as a refugee from Gambia in 2015. As his career has developed in Hamburg, doubts over his true identity and age have brought investigations and reduced him to a prop within the national conversation around immigration. Twice Jatta has been investigated. Twice it has been decided that he has no case to answer. St Pauli were one of the clubs to publicly offer their support.
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Last year, Jatta volleyed the winner against them in this game. Now, 12 months on, the 24-year-old scores a very different goal and it comes at a cost. Leart Paqarada’s desperate challenge does not prevent him from scoring but it does leave Jatta broken on the goalline, scattered at the base of the stand. As the flares and firecrackers are lit once more and the fans celebrate above, Jatta’s team-mates kneel over him, cradling their winger as his face contorts with pain.
It is like a scene from a Renaissance painting.
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Characterising the relationship between HSV and St Pauli is particularly difficult.
Anybody tasked with describing it is at the mercy of who they talk to and what they see. And what they’re allowed to witness. Some people speak of hostility and genuine resentment, others of more a nebulous relationship. Many more just will not talk to journalists and never will, leaving anybody looking from the outside peering through a pane of glass, watching and guessing.
Before the game, when the S-Bahn up to the Volkspark snakes out of the city, it passes through St Pauli itself. The carriages are full of HSV fans, and they get on everywhere. There is a police presence on regular patrols, and yet the only spectacle is a vast, drunken supporter who collapses into a platform like a sack of wet cardboard.
At the Reeperbahn, the closest stop to the Millerntor itself, fans from both sides get on. They do not mingle, but there is no tension either. Conflict exists — the 2018 derby immediately after HSV’s relegation was very rough and, year to year, there are certainly skirmishes and flashpoints — but there is little of the for-the-sake-of-it aggression that so often characterises other rivalries.
But then this is not a typical derby. It is not a political war. Nor is there enough footballing history between the two for any real bitterness to have festered. It is more a clash of ideas about what football fandom should be — a dispute over what function the game should perform within a person’s life.
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George Balakrishna moved to Hamburg two years ago. He left England as a Chelsea supporter with the expectation that HSV would become his team. His first matchday experience in the city was even at the Volkspark and yet, like an awkward first date, the chemistry just was not there. His gravitation towards St Pauli happened naturally. He was living in the area itself and playing for a local football club, the Hamburg Hurricanes.
“We’re a multicultural team,” he tells The Athletic.
“There are 36 nationalities in the football club and many of us were new in Hamburg when we joined. We’re all fairly politically engaged and there’s a natural disposition towards St Pauli. It’s also one of the best ways of making friends.
“I remember the first game I went to. It was on a Friday night and it was just more of a party atmosphere. I started going every week and to away games, too. I also didn’t feel like I had to prove my fandom. Established fans weren’t looking at me, in my group of people — a mix of nationalities, all speaking English — and thinking, ‘What are they doing here?’. It was quite the opposite: they were interested – it was normal.”
In Nick Davidson’s book on St Pauli (Pirates, Punks & Politics: Falling in Love with a Radical Football Club), a similar acceptance is described. His book was published in 2014 and yet, almost a decade later, the atmosphere George found was not much different. It was easy for him to find a new home; fandom helped him to create a community for himself.
Such support is invaluable. What neither of us know when we speak is that George will not make it to the end of the game on Friday night and that, shaken up and despondent, he will leave the Volkspark at half-time.
Having arrived at Stellingen station in the late afternoon, riot police noticed that his scarf was partly obscuring his face and quickly set upon him.
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“I was surrounded by around 10 police officers who pushed me against the wall,” he says. “They demanded to see my identification and accused me of trying to conceal my identity. Then they questioned why I was there.”
George, who is mixed race, was also the only person within his group to be singled out.
“Eventually, they gave me an ‘Anzeige’ (a police notice) and I’ll have to pay a fine when it comes through the post.”
It is a disturbing story. It seems incongruous with the spirit of the day. At the last Stadtderby back in October, a video clip of the police beating a St Pauli supporter outside the Millerntor went viral. At the time, the police addressed the video on Twitter by saying the actions of the officer shown were part of a containment strategy and that it was a response to provocation. Anyone who has seen that clip, however, would struggle to accept that explanation.
So, while there is doubtless an edge to be found, such incidents — even with precedent — are shocking because conversations with fans in the weeks prior reveal little toxicity. Werder Bremen is the club that HSV really despise. Hansa Rostock, also in Bundesliga 2, are St Pauli’s true political enemy.
In Hamburg, perhaps there just is not enough familiarity to breed that naked contempt. There is also a sense that the two sets of supporters don’t really understand each other — that one half of the rivalry is perplexed at how football can only be about the game itself, and the other is incredulous there can ever be anything more important than the score. Dislike and even hatred can flow into those voids, certainly, and the two fanbases also trade plenty of class-based insults. But whether it has the binary quality of a holy war is another question.
Tobias Kroger has lived in Hamburg all his life. His mother, his aunts and his grandparents used to live just a few streets away from Uwe Seeler, up by the club’s old training ground. HSV is in his family. The club is in his blood.
What, then, have the last five years been like for him?
“Exhausting.”
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Tobias was in the Volkspark when the team were relegated. HSV beat Borussia Monchengladbach that day, but Wolfsburg’s victory against Mainz condemned them to the drop. With full-time approaching and all hope gone, flares thrown onto the pitch forced the pausing of the game.
“Full-time was delayed,” he says, “and you had the time to think about going down. Some people were relieved that it was finally over.”
He also describes his shock at how many fans assumed that promotion back would be instant. It has not worked out that way and, in the five years since, the rivalry with St Pauli has developed a real footballing significance, even if it still lacks real heat.
“The ultras are different. But I know a lot of St Pauli fans, and I also know a lot of HSV and St Pauli who get on together. It’s more like… poking each other. We’ll ruin your season! Stuff like that. And I like what they stand for.”
If there is a grievance, he says, it is that many HSV fans bristle at St Pauli’s underdog image.
“They have a really cool stadium, big for the second division. The merchandising is perfect, the marketing is perfect and the team is often really good. But they always say that when they finish 13th, ‘Oh, we didn’t get relegated — good season’.
“When HSV lose — any game — everyone from outside says that we’re in crisis and should be performing better.”
HSV start to tick after Jatta’s goal. Roaming playmaker Ludovit Reis begins to snap his passes about and find space. Sonny Kittel is playing well, too, and both combine in a move that ends with Moritz Heyer scoring and, at 3-1, the game looks over.
But this will be a derby that never quite dies.
Elias Saad breaks away to make it 3-2 and give St Pauli hope — only for Jakov Medic to divert Kittel’s cross into his own net 10 minutes from time to apparently extinguish it.
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At 4-2, the contest might be over, but St Pauli’s players know what this game means and play with miles of heart. Jackson Irvine glances in Marcel Hartel’s corner, another header in an outstanding season, and HSV’s knees really start to knock. A volley is whipped across the face of Heuer Fernandes’ goal, then David has to recover smartly on the edge of his own box. At 4-3, the game — even the season — is on a precipice. The 57,000 present are living and dying with every moment, the stadium rising and falling with each kick and clearance. Anywhere-will-do and every punt, header or tackle draw a mighty roar.
When the full-time whistle arrives, it scatters the visitors to the floor. St Pauli players lie broken around the centre circle as their opponents skip giddily to the far end, and the fence in front of their fans.
More rockets, more flares, more noise.
More warnings.
Nobody cares.
More fire.
Walter is down there too, squeezing necks and all wild-eyed with joy. Even the mascot is on the penalty spot, with his stubby dinosaur arms waving a rhomboid flag as the stands burn above him.
Derbysieger. This is what it means and this is what it looks like. It is nearly 9pm now and the Volkspark is shrouded in gathering darkness. Nobody has left and somebody somewhere cuts the floodlights. The flares burn brilliant red behind the goal and the ultras are still singing, heaving cordite fumes into their lungs as they do, but now the stadium around them is lit with a purple hue and thousands of phone torches dancing in the stands.
German football has its rhythms and routines, and a choreography that can become stale. Its special occasions are so whole-hearted, so decadent, that the sensory high they create can be very difficult to leave. HSV players are pirouetting. The mascot is twirling. Walter grabs hold of his captain, Schonlau, and they embrace in the twilight.
Far away at the other end, in the darkness now, the visiting fans pound out one last defiant chorus.
“Sankt Pauli! Sankt Pauli! Sankt Pauli!”
HSV supporters flow out of the stadium in rich, blue, black and white streams. Children, women, men. Young and old. Bucket hats and t-shirts. Scarves and hoodies. Even a wedding dress. Everyone is together, rolling through the park again and back to the station. Between the grills that are still cooking, power chords thudding out through cheap speakers and into a crowded forecourt, with the air full of body odour and cologne, and the floor drenched in beer.
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When the S-Bahn rattles out of Stellingen, its windows are being pounded and someone is banging a glass bottle on the handrails. Someone else is stamping on the same few cans, again and again. Further down the carriage, someone is playing Always Hamburg — HSV’s Torhymne — on their phone. Again and again.
It starts and restarts, on and on.
It is raucous and victorious and wild. The closer the train gets to the centre of town, the louder the carriage becomes. It throbs with noise as it rattles through the night, back towards the white stone, to the red brick, the flashing neon and the broken glass.
Back to Hamburg, whatever that may be.
Explore the venues, from the stadia to where to eat and stay when visiting Hamburg in our interactive Google map:
(Photos in top image: Christian Charisius / picture alliance via Getty Images; Martin Rose / Getty Images; Stuart Franklin / Getty Images; Stuart Franklin / Getty Images. Designed by Sam Richardson)