A Different Kind of Football: 100 Years of Workers’ Football – 125 Years of Workers’ Sport

The travelling exhibition ‘The Other Football: 100 Years of Workers’ Football – 125 Years of Workers’ Sport’ was presented to the public for the first time at the German Football Museum. Rare exhibits and a total of 17 illustrated panels shed light on an important chapter in German sporting history.

In the workers’ sports movement – now almost forgotten – men and women had been organising themselves since the end of the 19th century to combine sport with class consciousness and to distinguish themselves from the nationalistically oriented bourgeois sports scene. Workers’ football was a powerful social force, particularly from the 1920s onwards, under the umbrella of the Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Federation (ATSB) and the communist Combat Association for Red Sports Unity (KG). This tradition came to a violent end when the National Socialists seized power.

Reinhard Grindel, then President of the German Football Association (DFB), said at the exhibition opening: “Workers’ sport is part of the history of German football and, with its values of fair play and solidarity, has contributed to its successful development. Nevertheless, football was then, as it is now, a reflection of social conditions. And so it is certainly to be welcomed that today we feel the great integrative power of football much more strongly across social classes.”