In earlier times, German football fans enjoyed a very special spectacle – indoor football. The supporters loved the up-close experience on the boards, while the players couldn’t get the fear of injury out of their minds. And yet: In the end, the beautiful memories remain.
“It’s a huge mess what ARD has done: In the game for third place at the indoor Masters, they hide themselves right before the decisive eight-meter shoot-out! The best thing to do is to log off your TV and go out for a fancy meal instead.” Wolfgang Nitz from Duisburg was really angry when First German Television stopped him from having fun with his great passion. Fans have loved their indoor tournaments for many decades. But then it suddenly ended in 2001. There were many reasons for that – but above all one: the spectacle in the hall had always been a dangerous affair for the players. BVB keeper Teddy de Beer even once described the heated duels as “hell”.
When Bayern’s Bernd Dürnberger once tore all of his cruciate ligaments, medial ligament and meniscus during an indoor tournament, he said afterwards: “It was a pain at the time, like someone hitting you with a hot iron.” It hurts just to hear it. But such injuries were not uncommon back then. While the fans behind the boards were up close and ecstatic – and often drunk – whipping their stars forward, the players gave their all on a wide variety of surfaces. Whether on artificial turf, parquet or linoleum – since the 1970s it has been played wherever it was possible and enough spectators could be accommodated. And that despite the fact that very few coaches were fans of these tournaments. Bremen legend Otto Rehhagel complained early on: “I’m against indoor football myself. But the clubs need the money.”
But on the other hand, Rehhagel couldn’t deny that the closeness between the fans and the players on the one hand, but also between the representatives of the individual clubs, had something to offer. The story from January 1993 is legendary, when the Bremen coach was particularly impressed by one player at an indoor tournament in Berlin: “Mario shot everything together, that was crazy.” Basler himself wrote about this tournament in his book “Actually I’m a Super Guy”: “I really let off steam and did whatever I wanted with my opponents. That didn’t seem to have gone unnoticed.”
Basler met Rehhagel at the urinal
And Basler also remembers what happened next: “After the semi-final, I was standing at the urinal when Werder coach Otto Rehhagel suddenly came in. He waited until I had washed my hands and handed me a piece of paper.” As he was leaving, the Bremen coach finally whispered to him that he should call him. And in fact: just a few months later, Mario Basler was already playing in the green and white jersey. That was also indoor football back then. In view of stories like these, fans can easily understand in retrospect that this very special atmosphere appealed to them. But at the end of the 1980s, concerns initially prevailed.
Paul Breitner had already hated the indoor tournaments as a Bayern star – and now, as a columnist, he made no secret of his negative attitude: “The players come from their winter vacation, put their suitcases down at home – and off they go to the indoor tournaments. That’s crazy . Anyone who comes out of regeneration as a high-performance athlete must be built up carefully.” But with booth magic, of course, exactly the opposite was the case. It was constantly going up and down in stuffy halls and on dull floors. When the sirens signaled the end of a game, the vast majority of players were completely exhausted.
Because of the fear of not being able to keep up, strange stories kept happening. Roland Wohlfarth, who was from Bochum at the time, bought the appetite suppressant “Recatol N” from the pharmacy in order to lose a few pounds. That worked – but in a doping test after an indoor tournament he also lost the right to play. The banned substance “norephedrine” contained in the appetite suppressant was on the doping list. The indoor football adventure was expensive fun for Wohlfarth and VfL Bochum. The result was a two-month ban and a fine of 60,000 marks.
FIFA decided not to use plexiglass
The prize money – at the end of the 1980s the tournament winners received between 15,000 and 30,000 DM – couldn’t keep up. For the clubs, it was still nice additional income in the weeks and months without spectator income. During the five weeks of the winter break, between 15 and 20 tournaments took place in Germany. And for the first time, FIFA organized an indoor World Cup in the Netherlands at the beginning of 1989. But since this was financially uninteresting for the DFB and the clubs preferred to earn their money at the tournaments themselves, Germany canceled.
But the DFB cited another reason for its decision against the World Indoor Championships. Unlike in the German halls, in the Netherlands the game was to be played without the popular plexiglass barriers, which the spectators always particularly liked because they gave the feeling of a close-up experience. And so the former master coach and columnist at the time, Max Merkel, wrote in his usual frivolous manner: “Indoor football without boards is like a wedding night without a wife.” And with that – he could be sure – he was speaking directly from the hearts of the fans who loved indoor football so much in those days.