Last Sunday’s annual general meeting of Hertha Berlin’s members struggled to sound upbeat. The gathering was not really a gathering because local public health restrictions meant the speeches were made to computer screens and watched digitally. It had not been a great weekend on the pitch, either.
The previous day, the team had drawn 0-0 at Wolfsburg, a team in free fall, without so much as a point in their previous seven Bundesliga outings and currently Hertha’s fellow-travellers in a region of Germany’s top division that no club with Champions League pretensions wants to occupy. Hertha sit 13th, Wolfsburg 14th in the 18-club table, the Berliners only four points clear of the relegation zone. And in Germany, so-called big clubs are not immune from the drop. Hertha need only peer down and see Hamburg and Schalke in the second tier.
But do Hertha, tenants of Germany’s most iconic arena, the Olympiastadion, count as a ‘big’ club? Their sporting director, the respected Fredi Bobic, addressed the issue in his 40-minute address to members at the AGM. “We have to grow into being a ‘big’ club,” he said. “It’s something we’re a long way from at the moment.”
Bobic is relatively new to his position — he was appointed last April — in an institution where executives come and go at a brisk rate and his tone was firm and full of hard truths. “We don’t want to fly any kites,” he told his audience. “For the last two or three years, a lot of breakthroughs have been announced, which is why the disappointments have been so hard.”
For decades, Berlin has pined for a club to represent the capital of Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, in the way other major capitals fly the flag in the world’s most popular sport. Madrid is home to the most successful European Cup club in history, Real; Atletico have a fine list of achievements, too. London is the home of the current Champions League holders, Chelsea, and five other Premier League clubs. Paris is the home of Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe. Roma have at least reached a European Cup final in their history. The last time a club from Berlin even played in the Champions League was Hertha in early 2000.
But a breakthrough in that record may be imminent. The awkward aspect of it for Hertha is that the club currently sniffing around a top-four finish in the Bundesliga — fourth place means a Champions League berth — are Union Berlin, the middle-budget upstarts from across the city, who progress from one breakthrough to another at a rate Bobic and his associates can only envy.
This Wednesday, Hertha host Union in the last 16 of the German Cup, and though the tie will be played before a reduced crowd because of Covid-19-imposed limits, the tension will be palpable. Eight places and nine points separate the clubs in the Bundesliga, and the last derby, in November, prompted upheaval at Hertha. Just over a week after Union beat their near-neighbours 2-0, Bobic replaced manager Pal Dardai with Tayfun Korkut, who became the fifth man in the job in barely two years.
That turnover speaks to the impatience at Hertha, where in 2019, a seismic breakthrough was anticipated. The entrepreneur Lars Windhorst took a 49 per cent stake in the club. The transfer budget grew, Jurgen Klinsmann came in as manager under the slogan ‘The Future Belongs to Berlin’. Klinsmann lasted only a few months, and the bright future remained stubbornly at arm’s length. Hertha have not finished in the top half of the Bundesliga table for any of the last four seasons.
Half-an-hour’s drive away, in what used to be East Berlin, part of the old German Democratic Republic until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there is only upward mobility. Union were promoted to the top flight of post-reunification German football for the first time in 2019, just as Hertha were coming into new money. Union and Hertha finished on the same points, 10th and 11th the following May. Last season, Union rose up to seventh and Hertha slipped to 14th.
The derby record, since the clubs have been in the top flight together, features two wins apiece and a draw. The lure to win Wednesday’s tie extends beyond local bragging rights. Bayern Munich have been knocked out of the German Cup as have Borussia Dortmund, a fillip for every other contender. Naturally, the final will be played in the Olympiastadion in the capital city that longs for a club it can call a champion.
