No Secret Police Cash For Union Berlin

By: chris | August 25th, 2009

Funds are hard to come by for a number of football clubs these days. Funds have been particularly hard to come by for bold German side Union Berlin, whose fans famously chipped in and hammered up to help the crisis earlier in the year.

Making it to the 2. Bundesliga was a great leap forward in both the football and financial realms, one which rewarded them with a €10m sponsorship from International Sports and was all sorts of wonderful news. Wonderful news until they had to say “thanks, but no thanks” because the chairman of the ISP was outed as a former captain in the Stasi.

ISP chairman Juergen Czilinsky’s was a member of the East German Stasi secret service. Czilinsky resigned as chairman of ISP earlier on Monday but his damage limitation efforts didn’t pay off. Newly-promoted FC Union Berlin were not convinced and canceled the partnership eventhough it meant the club would lose millions.

Questions have also surfaced whether the ISP’s funds may partly originate from secret funds, stashed away by former secret police officials during the dying days of Communism in East Germany. Older FC Union fans say they can still vividly remember the times when club and fans were facing secret police repression.

And while an affiliation with the former East Germany’s secret police might be enough, it’s particularly bad for a club like Union Berlin, whose identity is so deeply rooted in its ideologies and even more so in its fans.

FC Union Berlin was always at a disadvantage when compared to their cross-city rivals BFC Dynamo. BFC Dynamo was run by the Stasi secret service — which had substantially larger funds and thus better players than the “underdogs” from East Berlin’s Koepenick working-class district.

The eastern German club always prided itself as an alternative to the Stasi-managed BFC Dynamo and reacted quickly to news about Czilinksy.

The number of cliches available borderlines on infinite, that it’s nice to see a club stick close to it’s roots, but in short span where the sport has been hit so violently by the economic downturn, one could see many clubs who would normally do the same look the other way for a quick injection of cash and ride out the backlash from the supporters. In a time when the identity of so many clubs seem on unstable grounds. But perhaps this is one of those rare breeds where the fans make the club, not vice-versa. Football could use more of that.