Formerly a scandal, now a museum
Homburg cult condoms return in the DFB Cup
October 31, 2023, 2:04 p.m
The future world champion Miroslav Klose once played for FC Homburg. The club first became known through a jersey advertisement that angered the DFB and is now experiencing a revival. These are different times: what was once a scandal now hangs in a museum and makes the club immortal.
FC 08 Homburg – there was something there. When the former Bundesliga club, which disappeared in the fourth division, hosts SpVgg Greuther Fürth in the DFB Cup, nostalgics will be reminded of a chapter in curious German football history. The Saarland club runs this Tuesday (6 p.m./Sky and in the live ticker on ntv.de) with a Billy Boy advertisement on the jersey sleeve – as a reminiscence of the once sensational coup with a condom manufacturer as the main sponsor.
This time it’s just a special jersey, but it brings back memories: For the 1987/88 season, the clever President Manfred Ommer, who died in 2021, won the condom manufacturer London as the main sponsor, allegedly for 200,000 marks. The official had previously received numerous rejections; then it should be a donor “that the press pounces on and that the DFB rejects.”
There was great outrage: the German Football Association under the then boss Hermann Neuberger imposed a fine of 100,000 marks and threatened to deduct points. That’s why the Homburgers initially covered the lettering with black bars. In the legal dispute, the Frankfurt am Main regional court ultimately decided on what the media mockingly called the “rubber paragraph”. Condom advertising violates neither custom nor morality. “That was priceless advertising,” Ommer later said triumphantly. How conservative the association’s reaction was was also shown by the fact that AIDS was a big issue in society at the time.
Not just condoms, but also world champions
The legendary jersey with the condom advertisement now hangs in the German Football Museum in Dortmund. It was exactly there that the club from the Saarland district town with 44,000 inhabitants came up with the idea of reviving condom advertising – during the draw for the second round of the cup. If you ask football fans today about FC Homburg, says treasurer Hans-Joachim Burgardt, the answer is often: “Weren’t they the ones with the condoms?”
For Homburg’s current coach Danny Schwarz, whose team knocked first division club SV Darmstadt 98 out of the competition in the first round, it is “with a little wink, an all-round successful campaign” and “a nice homage to the past”. The former Bundesliga professional said in an interview on dfb.de: “I think it captures today’s zeitgeist. In 1988 I was still too young and didn’t notice it first hand. It’s clear that jersey advertising for a condom manufacturer was a scandal back then. “It just shows how much the world has changed.”
The public attention did not help the Homburg team at the time with players like Jimmy Hartwig, Tom Dooley, Walter Kelsch, Thomas Stickroth, Horst Ehrmantraut and Werner Vollack in any significant way in terms of sport: FCH was relegated as second to last in the table, although in 1987/88 it was in Slobodan Cendic, Gerd Schwickert and Uwe Klimaschefski wore out three coaches. The immediate resurgence was followed by another crash in 1990, and the club has not been seen in the upper house since then. The Homburgers’ history can not only point to their famous condom advertising, but also to two players who were or became world champions for other clubs: Werner Kohlmeyer (1954/1. FC Kaiserslautern) and Miroslav Klose (2014/Lazio Rome ).