The football game between Mannheim and Kaiserslautern quickly ceases to be about football. That's not surprising. The bitter message: Football alone cannot prevent the foreseeable event.
It was clear after just two minutes that this football game would no longer be about football in the end. The ball hadn't rolled too much when things stopped going for the first time. There was so much lightning, booming and smoke in and in front of the SV Waldhof Mannheim fan curve.
And there was even more lightning, booming and smoke in and in front of 1. FC Kaiserslautern, so referee Robert Schröder interrupted the first round DFB Cup game for several minutes. In the end, however, that was just a teaser for everything that was supposed to give this atmospheric derby between two southwest rivals its dark shadow - and what almost led to its cancellation.
It was clear from the moment the horses arrived that this football game would no longer be about football in the end. The horses and the dogs. And especially the police officers. Hundreds of police officers in full protective gear. The extra time should actually have started in Mannheim's Carl Benz Stadium.
Instead, clouds of fog rolled across the field, rockets hissed through the air, there were repeated bangs and glowing beacons hit the lawn. And even though there was to be a 1-0 winning goal for FCK later, in the last minute of extra time, it was these images that stayed in the end. They were images of a football stadium that had become a combat zone.
The two fan camps had basically set off tons of pyrotechnics throughout the entire game. However, the whole thing only escalated dramatically at the end of the regular season. The score was 0-0 after 90 minutes of football, in which both the third division club from Mannheim and the second division club from Kaiserslautern had enough chances to score a goal and yet didn't.
In the last scene before the final whistle, the players clashed on the pitch. The typical football formation of a pack after a duel near the touchline that was a little too energetic was then the starting point for a spiral of monstrosities that was untypical even by football standards.
The timing in the now finally overheated atmosphere was as follows: When the FCK players and their coaching team gathered in front of their substitution bench to prepare for extra time, tons of beer cups and plastic flagpoles flew at them from the main stand.
Probably as a direct reaction to this, fans from the away corner fired several flares towards the main stand, which landed in the middle of the spectators - where the family block is in Mannheim. This in turn apparently encouraged some of the Mannheim supporters behind the opposite goal to overcome the barriers and storm onto the field. While the teams immediately fled to the cabins, the police arrived with a dog and horse squad.
The officers engaged in a violent confrontation with Mannheim fans and gradually pushed them back into the block, from where firecrackers and rockets continued to fly in the direction of people and animals. For a good 30 minutes, during which the situation became increasingly calm, the field was now occupied only by the police and a much smaller group of stadium stewards.
Then the stadium announcer announced that the game would be canceled if even one more firecracker flew onto the lawn. The game then actually continued. This was followed by extra time, in which there were no further riots, but there was a remarkable long-range shot from Ibrahim Kanaté (120th minute).
One of the special features of the DFB Cup is that - in addition to the ever-changing duel between big and small - it also gives football occasional encounters with big rivals who rarely cross paths in everyday league life. The duel between Mannheim and Kaiserslautern, for example, apart from three years together in the third division between 2019 and 2022, only happened once in this millennium - in a DFB Cup game around 25 years ago.
Otherwise, the Kurpfälzer from Mannheim and the West Palatinate from Kaiserslautern, who had since fallen to the top league, were mostly in different football orbits. That's probably why something had built up between the two fan scenes.
After all, there are only a few football rivalries in Germany that are viewed as enmity by supporters like the one between SV Waldhof and FCK. The Mannheim team declared “Death to FCK” to be their motto for this game. Shirts with the corresponding lettering, above which there is a martial, kitschy angel impaling a devil with a lance, were worn not only by ultras on Friday evening, but also by women and senior citizens.
Meanwhile, the already established insult “Waldhof die” was emblazoned on a large number of the shirts in the Kaiserslauterer Kurve. A slogan that goes back to an anti-Semitic slogan from the Nazi era.
The fact that this football game would no longer be about football in the end should probably have come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the increasing polarization of this feud. Kaiserslautern's sports director Thomas Hengen, for example, said afterwards that things had "really been building up in the last few days", and that there had been "an extreme derby atmosphere", which ultimately led to border crossings on both sides.
And while the players, especially from the victorious Kaiserslautern team, made every effort to focus on the sport in the interviews after the game, Hengen was obviously aware that the dark clouds that had once again gathered over a football game would not be dispelled so quickly.
However, he does not consider the mandatory penalties from the German Football Association, which are now likely to follow for both clubs, to be the solution. “It’s a never-ending story that you sit down together and actually choose a different approach,” said Hengen. It's about closing "a legal vacuum" such as exists in the stadium, "not only through football, but also through the legislature" with harsher penalties, said Hengen.
It sounded like a cry for help. Football alone cannot prevent the foreseeable. That was probably the bitter message that came from this DFB Cup evening - from a football game that was no longer about football in the end.
