Despite the successful hosting of last year's World Cup and the glorious bullying 13-0 defeat of San Marino, recent times have not been the most positive in German football (nor indeed in German sport in general). In many ways, we are in just deserts territory here but not entirely so. How come the hosting of the spectacular society premier global football tournament has still produced a period of defensive self-analysis?
As we have posted previously, the Bundesliga is the least corrupted of the big 5 European football leagues being a different magnitude of meritocratic when compared with the nonsense in the Premiership or Serie A. When the link was proven between referee Robert Hoyzer and Croatian underground betting rings, the authorities moved at speed to convict the corrupt official both with respect to the laws of the game and the laws of the land. Furthermore, another top flight referee, Jürgen Jansen, would have been banned in the scandal if a behind-the-scenes agreement had not been reached by the DFB and Berlin's public prosecutors office. But proper credit must be given to the German authorities. All major illegal gambling on the Bundesliga for periods of season 2006/07 were directly targeted by the authorities. A considerable area of our early season analysis focused on this totally unique way of undermining the match manipulators. Professional betting money was being forced either to be less psychopathic in it's degree of corruption (ie less greedy) or out of the game altogether in search of other properly psychopathic pastures. The mechanism utilised by the DFB is complex and analytically proprietary but it forms only part of a declared longer term strategy for the domestic markets to be under the direct control of the DFB. There are evidently infrastructural similarities between England and Germany here but it should be noted that both the inner workings of the power hierarchy and the degree of corruption are markedly dissimilar.
Despite cleaning up their act regarding Hoyzer and Jansen, the German referees have still produced a problematic year (and not just for underworld gambling syndicates). Herbert Fandel has been parachuted to stratospheric levels since Michel Platini took control of European football. I have a problem with this. Match data analysis, match performances, inability to gauge a violent atmosphere, peculiar correlations to particular betting market patterns, and a refereeing style that made Graham Poll's degree of egotism seem mild suggest that Fandel, if allowed to officiate at all, should be in the German Regional Leagues or some equivalent level. And he's got big hair...
Fandel has been chosen for three major events in the late season. First was his inflammatory refereeing of the Roma versus Manchester United uproar in the Stadio Olympico. People got hurt because of his style of refereeing on that evening and being struck off might have been a suitable reward. But no. Give the man the premier club game on the planet instead and let him fuck that up too. And so it came to pass (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/05/low-lie-fields-of-athens.html). Not content with allowing Fandel to mess up big style twice, he was then given, and eventually forced to abandon after being assaulted by a stroppy Danish fan, the Denmark versus Sweden Euro 2008 Qualifier. Flouncy drama queen style officiating is not a good idea when there is a bit of an atmosphere going down. Spectacular society cannot spectacularise bigotry, hatred, hooliganism and regional and international rivalries and the game would be improved if low key officials were in charge of such events.
Kicker magazine is the ultimate source for football data on the Bundesliga. Kicker is obsessive about all aspects of match data (as indeed are the media of all the other major leagues; it is only in England where this level of analytical information is hidden from public gaze) and they rate the referees in an obsessively detailed manner. My personal view is that the best referee in Germany is Knut Kircher. Let's compare Fandel with Kircher. Kicker rates referees on a 1 to 6 basis (one being excellent). Fandel only scored 2.5 or higher on four occasions (19% of games); Kircher achieved sixteen 2.5+ ratings (57%). Or, to enhance the point, 3.5+ being achieved by Kircher 86% of the time; Gagelmann 94%; Fandel 52%.
Fandel isn't the only overrated and allegedly corrupt referee still operating in the Bundesliga and, if it were in our interests, we would be more expansive about our database. But it isn't...
It is to Germany's credit that it has just been announced that a serving policewoman, Bibiana Steinhaus, will referee second level Bundesliga games from next season. This is an immensely positive move of the type that we have been advocating throughout the lifetime of this blog. Less Poll and Wiley and more women officials please.
This spectrum of pluses and minuses in the world of German refereeing has had to take it's slot on a crowded stage. Below are just a few of the other destabilisers that have hit Deutschland of late.
* Johansson losing to Platini in the race to be UEFA supremo totally undermined the rumoured hidden agenda of Beckenbauer stepping into the Swedes shoes after a year. Der Kaiser threw all his toys out of the pram and sacked Magath as FC Bayern manager. Impulsive stroppy strategy is rarely a good thing as Bayern managed not only to fail to win the Bundesliga title but achieved a creative double whammy of missing out on the Champions League too.
* The revelations relating to pumped up Jan Ullrich and a host of other German cyclists who explored the benefits of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) have rocked the country massively. Cycling is serious in Germany and the invalidation of past sporting triumphs is not easy to swallow. Links from the doping ring to Freiburg's sports teams and medical establishments and the consequent adjacentness to current German football team boss Joachim Löw have hardly lifted the gloom. Bring back Klinsmann! PESs have existed in German sport for far too long and it is an unreasonable abuse to expect or force your countrymen (and women) to damage their bodies in search of sporting excellence. This sentence could equally have been applied to virtually any other first world country but, despite that, we have never seen an incidence similar to Bayer Leverkusen in the year they reached the Champions League Final and the negative reaction to their alleged PESs usage during the following season.
* The general level of merely adequate performances across the board in football have been a source of much angst. Performances of German club teams in the Champions League and UEFA Cup has been abysmal and it is not a normally recognisable German trait to regard a Semi Final defeat to Italy with home advantage to represent a World Cup success.
* FC Bayern have been displaying a degree of paranoia regarding their supposed demotion in the ranks of the G14(18). Such adjustment has probably occurred but it's a bit rich to hear the Bavarians complaining about an abuse of power and privilege.
Capacity crowds being the norm for German football matches makes the Premiership and Serie A green with envy. There are a complex array of reasons for the high number of sell-outs in the Bundesliga but there are a few that the DFB might particularly like to focus on as they move forward into the post-Hoyzer era. Crowds have fallen in England and Italy as the general consensus of opinion in both countries among the true spectators (not the prawn sandwich lot) is that the game has sold out to a rather unpleasant mixture of inappropriate individuals. There are clear indications that the DFB, in it's desire to be able to compete on a level playing field across European and global football competitions, is selecting a similarly corrupt edifice to the ones in place in Serie A and the Premiership. The German fan is a knowledgeable fan and this simply isn't going to wash. And, furthermore, the timing is poor. The German model will be up and running at just around the time when mainstream media is forced to acknowledge the corruption in the global game related the betting markets.
If you are going to be corrupt, get a distinct first mover advantage. For repeated examples, monitor Murdoch's empire building strategies...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
