No Dice Magazine PDF (12MB)

was none of the dubious suspicion that accompanies financing
of that sort today. As the gift horse’s mouth opened wide,
TeBe closed its eyes tightly shut. The benefactors were the
investment trust, Göttinger Gruppe, and they seemed happy
to invest freely in order to achieve the maximum amount of
sporting success in the shortest amount of time possible.
TeBe smashed their way into the 2.Bundesliga, finishing
thirty-two points clear of their nearest rivals, Dynamo Dresden,
without losing a single game in the 1997/98 season. High
calibre players such as Uwe Rösler and Toni Micevski were
lured to Berlin with exorbitant sums of money in time for the
2.Bundesliga campaign.
Naturally, their rivals for promotion were not impressed at
how uneven TeBe’s new-found riches had made the playing
field, even if much of the resentment that was directed at
the club for having apparently bought success is somewhat
off-target: in the early and mid-Nineties, TeBe were often
promotion candidates and the cash injection simply gave them
the push required to not only be able to win promotion but also
consolidate their 2.Bundesliga position.
Carsten’s co-founder of wesavetebe.de, Christian Rudolph, can
verify the animosity that TeBe fans endured, having himself
been part of it. “I had a really bad view of TeBe ... [they were]
a dislikeable team in the 2.Bundesliga times,” he said. But
in 2007, he started an internship with the club and saw the
reality. “[My opinion] was very quickly revised. I’m not even
really a football fan, I always found football too chavvy. But
I really found a home here ... it’s not the usual rowdiness and
abusiveness that you have with other teams.”
Carsten identifies the antipathy that the TeBe fans had to
endure in the Nineties as key in the development of the fan
scene.
“TeBe had a pretty strange appearance to the outside world
and a lot of bad things happened that directed a lot of hatred
towards the team. It was a good thing, almost, to see how
people dealt with the hate and persevered. That’s a particular
quality [of TeBe fans] .... we’d go to 1. FC Union Berlin and
there’d be bottles thrown at the old granddads in our crowd.
That really politicised our fan scene, as well as simultaneously
immunising it against people that we simply don’t want to
have around.”
Especially from East Berlin came a great deal of resentment
towards the newly-rich team from the already-wealthy
district of Charlottenburg. Beliefs, however, are moulded and
reinforced by adversity. They must exist beforehand, of course,
but it is only when they are threatened do they reinforce,
recruit, and advance. This is exactly what happened on the
terraces at TeBe in the late Nineties, as the fans started to
organise and stand firm.
TeBe fans were defending their way of life from external
sources, but soon it became clear that the biggest threat was
from inside the club. The Göttinger Gruppe, in their efforts
to achieve success as quickly as possible with their new
plaything, neglected to attempt to understand the wishes of the
TeBe fans. The players who joined were drawn by cash rather
than any particular attraction to the famous old purple Tennis
Borussia shirt.
The team’s second season in the 2.Bundesliga in 1999 started
excellently, with promotion looking eminently possible until
March, when ten of the last twelve games resulted in defeat.
Relegation was narrowly avoided, but off the pitch, things
were even worse.
Current Tennis Borussia chairman, Andreas Voigt, remembers
the period well. He was running the TeBe marketing
department that year and, as a true and pragmatic TeBe fan,
recalls that season as a success, since relegation was avoided.
One can’t help but feel that his über-ambitious bosses did not
agree, and as the Deutscher Fussball Bund (DFB) required
guarantees about the club’s financial health in order to be
allowed to participate in the following season’s 2.Bundesliga,
perhaps the Göttinger Gruppe saw an easy way to disengage
themselves from their little experiment.
According to Voigt, “back then, the DFB required a bank
guarantee and the Göttinger Gruppe had one from their own
bank ... but the DFB didn’t accept it. I believe the Göttinger
Gruppe would have gotten the relevant guarantee from a
different bank, but they were stubborn about it and had a
dispute with the DFB. That’s where everything went wrong
because the DFB didn’t grant them a licence for the second
division. You could speculate though, whether that was the
Göttinger Gruppe’s intention or whether they really were just
too proud, but that’s not a question that I can answer.”
TeBe was forcibly relegated to the third division, and
consequently lost the support of the Göttinger Gruppe
(whose fortunes were also on the decline, finally starting
insolvency proceedings in 2007) and the vast majority of
their expensively-assembled squad. A second consecutive
relegation was inevitable, and a year and a half after pushing
for promotion to the Bundesliga, TeBe was floundering in the
fourth division.
While the sporting side of things may have been difficult
for TeBe fans after the turn of the century, there was a sense
of relief amongst the fans at having their club back. The
following seven years in the Oberliga Nord saw consistent, if
unspectacular performances, and even featured four victories
in the Berliner Pokal (Berlin Cup).
By 2007, as TeBe’s financial affairs reached an even keel and
on-the-field performances became increasingly reliable, they
were again attracting the attention of large-scale investors.
This time it was the secretive Swiss company Treasure AG
providing the funds.
With the benefit of hindsight, one can criticise the club for
TeBe
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