By the way...

The other day at the Tivoli

"Krone Vorarlberg" author Harald Petermichl takes a look at Aachen this week. The local team Alemannia has made it and is back in professional soccer. However, it seems as if they haven't quite arrived off the pitch yet, as he notes in the latest edition of his column "Oh, by the way...".

It has taken twelve years for Alemannia, who are based at Aachen's Tivoli and were German runners-up in 1968/69, to make it out of the depths of the regional league and back into paid soccer. This inevitably brought with it increased media attention, which immediately led to major unrest at the club, albeit largely self-inflicted. At a time when a party in the east of the republic that has been classified by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a suspected right-wing extremist and whose youth organization has been categorized as definitely right-wing extremist is preparing to become the strongest force in the state elections in Saxony and Thuringia because, as polls show, an incredible number of eligible voters don't care that the party holds such positions, right-wing ideas are now also a hot topic at Alemannia.

WDR, which reported on this for Sportschau, is realistic enough to know that this is neither a specifically Aachen nor a typically German issue, as soccer has always been a popular docking point for right-wing extremists around the world who try to spread their sick ideas in the stadiums. The only subtle difference is that many clubs, together with their fan organizations, actively combat this and show a clear stance against the right, while at Alemannia things seem to have gone very wrong recently because, according to the WDR, "the club's top management has an obviously close relationship with right-wing extremist supporters in the fan block". In a hasty reaction on the club's own website, which has since been deleted, the club "distanced itself". Interestingly, not from the right-wing extremists, but "from the Sportschau report".

A video has now been quickly added in which Supervisory Board Chairman Marcel Moberz and Managing Director Sascha Eller distance themselves from right-wing ideas and admit to one or two of their own mistakes. Unfortunately, the film is so amateurishly made that Moberz's Freudian slip that "lots of great people at Tivoli" have "a very fine complex of values ... er ... values compass" is almost one of the highlights. It's well-intentioned, but as we all know, "well-intentioned" is often the little sister of "pretty wrong". Let's hope that Alemannia gets its act together; more than 10,000 members have a right to do so.