Two cities in one and no champion. At least, since the Bundesliga was founded in 1963. And you have to rewind to 1931, when the Nazi party had not yet taken power in Germany (it did so in 1933), to find the last leader of the capital, Hertha. “Berlin is very big and each area has its own things…” explains Marc Torrejón. The Catalan is the owner of a curious brand: he is the only Spanish player who has played for Unión Berlin. “But,” he adds, “football is not the main thing in the city except for the neighborhoods where there are teams.”
Berlin has about 3.5 million inhabitants; more than a country like Uruguay (three million), two World Championships and 15 Americas Cups; less than Croatia (3.8), finalist in Russia 2018 and bronze medalist in Qatar 2022. However, this season, Unión Berlin was seven goals away from playing for promotion to avoid relegation. They tied on points with Bochum (33), but were saved thanks to goal average. If it had fallen to the Second Division, Berlin would have become with Valletta (Malta) the only European capitals without any representative in the First Division of their country.
Today Berlin is, for example, very far from the five teams that London has in the Premier League, not to mention when compared to Buenos Aires: 12 clubs in the First Division.
Berlin, however, does not lack clubs – Dynamo (the great champion of the former GDR), Tennis Borussia, Viktoria, Hertha Zehlendorf and Hertha BSC, as well as Union, among others – nor passion. “That was what surprised me the most: the atmosphere of the stadium and the closeness between the fan and the player. The treatment that there is within the Unión with the fan is what makes it so special,” Torrejón recalls. Before landing in the German capital, the centre-back trained in Espanyol’s youth system had played for Kaiserslautern and Freiburg. “I wanted a radical change and start from scratch in a place where they didn’t know me. When I visited the Kaiserslautern stadium I told myself that I wanted to play there,” explains Torrejón, brother of Marta, a multi-time champion with Barcelona, about her departure from Spain. And Germany conquered it. Their stadiums did it, “they are always full,” he says, as well as their football culture, “of maximum respect.”
The Berlin problem is too much Berlin.
Although there is no longer a wall and what little remains of it is the meat of tourists, most of them desperate to leave a photo on their social networks next to the famous graffiti by Dmitri Vladimirovich Vrubel, which portrays a kiss between Leonidas Brezhnev (general secretary of the Party Communist and president of the USSR) and Erich Honecker (head of government of the GDR), the capital of Germany seems at times to have two souls. Or several. Some soccer players, none of them enough to just give themselves to the ball. “In Berlin there is everything. Not only is it very large, but it is also very diverse,” Torrejón concludes. Far from the industrial Ruhr basin, which has soccer cities such as Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Essen and Cologne, among others, the German capital’s leisure offering eclipses ball: three operas, two zoos and countless theaters and restaurants .
Berlin is too big, too diverse, too cultural, even for something as exaggerated as football.
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