Soccer violence in the land of the World Champions

Another Look what we found in the Draft folder post.

Soccer cynics we are, spoil sports we try not to be. So, a post about violence at soccer games had to sit in the drafts until the 2014 Sausage Fest was over.

Equally important as our desired reputation as benign cynics, though, was the fact that watching some games would give our American readers a better foundation for understanding what we wanted so explain.

That backfired a bit, because we wanted to say, look, American football with its dolled up plastic gladiator style armor is so much more violent than soccer, yet, soccer fans are more violent than football fans.

Only the latter part of the statement holds: there is quite a bit of violence around major league soccer in Germany. One particularly bad weekend last year or so involved clashes between hundreds of fans in different cities, fan buses with windows smashed by opposing fans, numerous arrests, and bitter complaints by police caught between them.

As a result, conferences were conferred, talks were talked, and resolutions passed. Then came the lull of the World Cup before the new soccer season.

And the great money debate started again. That's the part where politicians, police, and the five or six Germans who do not like soccer say: wait, why should the taxpayer foot the bill for the massive police deployments at a time when the big clubs rake in huge profits and everybody has to watch their spending?

From an American perspective, you'd say "dah, that's obvious", but the Germans have not gone down that road yet.

This week, a surprise announcement from the state interior secretary of Germany's most populous state of North-Rhine-Westfalia enlivened the debate: police presence in stadiums will be reduced, as will the generous escorting of buses of fans.

Note that they did not say the police wants extra cash for their weekend work, only that deployment will be scaled back in the upcoming season.

This puts the clubs on notice to provide more monitors and club security and is a let's see how that pans out approach. In an ideal world, fans would be happy to be treated like mature adults and do their part by behaving better.

But large groups of males with lots of booze and a tendency to bring some seriously right wing, at times whatever-phobic attitudes along for the game, are not the most realiably responsible folks.

We'll let you know how the new police strategy works out.