Inside Union Berlin's miracle
The story of Union Berlin's extraordinary rise to the top of the Bundesliga told with the help of those who know the club best
"Unsere liebe. Unsere mannschaft. Unser stolz. Unser verein." – Union Berlin fans
This is the chant that provides the soundtrack to the final seven minutes of Union Berlin’s 2-0 win over Borussia Dortmund on Sunday evening. The Stadion An Der Alten Forsterei pulsates to its rhythm.
Our love. Our team. Our pride. Our club.
Dortmund were broken by the end, mentally and physically. It should have been the players of Union who were tired. They had not only played more recently but had chased the ball for much of the match, closing down avenues of attack, shuffling across, ever willing.
Instead, it was Dortmund's brilliant 19-year-old midfielder Jude Bellingham who sank to his knees upon the final whistle, bereft when faced with the forlorn task of breaking down the best defence in the Bundesliga. For now, at least, the best team in the Bundesliga too.
Union Berlin.
Their success is easy to enjoy but harder to explain. This club has no billionaire benefactor. Promotion to the top division came for the first time in 2019 upon which the goal was to survive as much as thrive. Twice since they have qualified for Europe.
But this is something else.
Ten games in and Union are top of the table, four points clear of Bayern. They are navigating the Europa League too. Malmo were met with the same resistance on Thursday evening. Then, the goal came late rather than early. The songs remained the same.
"It gives you more energy. You feel it from the warm-up." – Julian Ryerson
The fan culture at Union, despite a relatively small capacity of 23,000, is now regarded as the envy of Germany. For British audiences, this may as well be another world.
When Eleanor Roosevelt, then first lady of the United States, visited Brazil in 1944, it is said that her response upon seeing the power and beauty of Iguazu Falls was to exclaim: ‘Poor Niagara!’
Poor Premier League. This is You’ll Never Walk Alone but for every minute of every game and then some. The stadium is packed 75 minutes before kick-off and stays that way long after the full-time whistle. The mood is one of encouragement rather than intimidation.
"Playing with the fans at our back, it helps," says Julian Ryerson, "It gives you more energy. You feel it from the warm-up, the first time you go out, because it is full from the warm-up."
The Norway wing-back joined the club in the second division but remains a pivotal player. There is a smile on his face but a breathlessness in his voice, speaking just minutes after keeping Dortmund at bay. Winning matches has become a habit now.
"We always have the confidence that we can beat anyone, especially here."
But, how do they actually manage to do it?
"Like we have always done it. Sticking to what we are good at. Sticking to the plan. Playing with courage. Our defensive organisation has been top and the counter-attack situations we have used really well this year and we did it again today.
"Working hard."
"It is completely insane." – Jacob Sweetman
Hard work is how this club has come to define itself.
The word eisern that forms half of the enduring mantra – Eisern Union! – literally means iron but represents much more. It evokes their working-class origins, the metalworkers' club from Kopenick, that area of south-east Berlin that was part of the old East Germany.
The yellow bricks used to build the façade of the stadium’s main stand are designed to call to mind the bricks of the factories half a mile away on the riverbanks where Union were founded. Fans are still routinely depicted as workers with shovel in hand.
It is all part of the mythology that makes this one of Europe's cult clubs.
Some of it, supporters might confess, has become a little overplayed. The story of fans literally donating blood to raise money for the club – Bleed for Union – is a nice yarn. Its chief consequence was to attract the attention of sponsors who stumped up the funds.
Though there are those who claim to have heard the famous chant 'Down with the Wall!' many admit they did not. While dissidents were drawn to Union, explicit opposition to the Stasi was practically impossible. Such a club could not have survived in East Germany.
Other tales, however, are truly extraordinary. The Christmas carol service that began with 89 souls letting themselves into the stadium in 2003 has become a Berlin institution, attended each year by 30,000 people, copied by clubs elsewhere in the country and publicised worldwide.
The story that 2,333 fans worked a total of 140,000 man-hours to rebuild this stadium themselves in 2009? "The rebuilding of the stadium is not a myth," says Jacob Sweetman. "I have never seen anything like that. It was a truly astonishing feat by those fans."
Sweetman is English by birth, Berliner by choice. The days when he was known around here as ‘the Ipswich fan’ are long gone. For the past 15 years, he has done more than perhaps anyone else to spread the gospel according to Union to the English-speaking world.
"I was at the last game at the old stadium," he says with obvious pride.
"There was not a dry eye in the house. People were hugging each other. You knew everyone who had worked on the building because they were given these bright red hard-hats. You saw someone in a hard-hat and they were just getting patted on the back and hugged everywhere they went. It was remarkable. I cannot remove that from the romance of it.
"The atmosphere, the love. I just felt welcomed in. I spoke no German at first. This was long before the rebuild of the stadium and that story. It was in the regional leagues and I did not see them win for weeks. But the fans stayed. There were six or seven thousand of them.
"There is still that sense of community here. People stand on the same spot on the terrace that they have stood for thirty years next to the same people, generation after generation. This is the sad thing about becoming an official at the club. I have lost my spot."
When Union needed someone to handle the ever increasing demands of the international media, Sweetman was the obvious choice. For Union, at least. Others might have opted for a teenager au fait with social media. "I am no good with emojis," he admits.
"My role is to bring us to the English-speaking world but it is also to transmit those roots so that new people coming in understand where we came from and what this is all about.
"I stumbled into it really. But since I have been watching this football club I have seen so many things that beggar belief. It just blows my mind every time. When I go for a smoke I go on the balcony and look over the pitch. It is my own little fairy-tale come true."
He is not alone in that.
"If you walk around the offices, every single person is a fan. From the marketing to the ticketing, these people have been going their entire lives. Eighty per cent live in Kopenick. Dirk Zingler, the president, was taken by his grandfather. That is what ties it together.
"It is all part of what makes the club special."
These marginal gains, this rare sense of togetherness, might explain the appeal of Union Berlin. It might even explain how they were able to reach the Bundesliga. It does not begin to explain how they currently find themselves at the very top of it.
"It is completely insane."
To tell that story, you need to tell the story of Urs Fischer.
"Urs Fischer really is a top coach. People don’t recognise it." – Christoph Biermann
Berlin's renowned Humboldt University has produced 29 Nobel prize winners in its 212 years of existence, Albert Einstein among them. That is a rate of one every seven years.
Urs Fischer is one in a million.
There are many reasons why people are drawn to Berlin. Some want to explore the past, others seek to shape the future. Fischer is simply here to work.
He is no romantic. There is no wanderlust in him. He never left Switzerland as a player or a coach before taking this job in 2018, but he had a pedigree as a title-winner with Basel and he has transformed Union. His new contract was celebrated more than them going top.
"Urs Fischer really is a top coach," says Christoph Biermann. "People don’t recognise it because he is not very good at marketing himself. Actually, he refuses to. Sometimes the other members staff are, I wouldn’t say frustrated by it, but have to encourage him.
"If Jurgen Klopp is at one end of the spectrum, always finding the right phrase to explain the situation, Urs is at the opposite and he knows it. But he looks duller than he is. He does what he has to do on the training ground and in the dressing room with the players."
Biermann, a veteran journalist for 11Freunde, spent an entire season embedded within the club following their promotion in 2019. Only four players remain from that squad, Ryerson among them, but Fischer's presence is more significant than the changing personnel.
"It is about recruitment but it is also about what Urs is making of these players. If you look, for example, at Rani Khedira. He was always a proper Bundesliga player but now he looks a class Bundesliga player because they have worked with him so much.
"They have shown him videos explaining exactly what they want from him in his midfield role and he has made the adjustments in his game. You can see that improvement with almost every player who has worked under Urs. And if they don’t get it, then they leave."
Biermann takes a drag on his cigarette and gesticulates out towards the pitch where Union are halfway to victory against a Dortmund side of ostensibly superior talent.
"Just look at them," he says. "They are so organised defensively that the man on the ball is always under pressure. Everybody is helping everybody else so there are almost no gaps. In the Bundesliga, there is nobody that is better organised defensively."
The statistics back that up. No other side has conceded so few.
"It is a decent team that is full of confidence. They have some quality but it is not as if the clubs in the Premier League are queuing up to buy their players. But everyone has a positive attitude here. The fans never boo a player or pick on him if he is having a bad day."
Christopher Trimmel was having one of those for 45 minutes against Malmo. The 35-year-old captain and club icon has been with Union since those second-division days. At times, he looks a man at his limit. A colleague glances over in the press box. "Trimmel looks old."
With that he finds his second wind, storming down the line like a world-class sprinter leaving his Malmo marker trailing as the crowd roars with delight. Against Dortmund just days later he is masterful in dealing with Raphael Guerreiro and the rest.
Fischer has coaxed that from him but his skill is that he has brought a disparate group together. In 2020, when the mercurial Max Kruse turned up for training in his Lamborghini, some feared he would not fit in. Instead, he gave them two good years.
Trimmel? He arrived in his motorbike leathers, helmet in hand.
"He is an artistic soul," says Sweetman. "The identification figure."
"They are not just the guys who bring the money. They are the most important part." – Christian Arbeit
Trimmel is so in tune with the supporters that his words in honour of retiring capo Fabian Voss – the long-time leader of the supporters in the Forest End – still resonate.
"It was not just about us and the game," he said.
At Union, it never is.
This was November 2019 and Fabian Voss was hanging up his microphone after 13 years. The man known as Vossi was given quite the send-off for that game against Borussia Monchengladbach. The club's ex-captain Damir Kreilach flew in from overseas especially.
Vossi's role has gone to capo Ali. He is the conductor now, rousing the supporters throughout from his platform in the Forest End. That stand, flanked by an antiquated manual scoreboard, houses the most boisterous of those in the three terraced stands.
Against Malmo, a huge image of an aeroplane emerges from among its supporters, accompanied by a message: Fasten your seatbelts, Union are in Europe. Three minutes into the game, it is still there before being swallowed by the supporters.
Ali's body frequently contorts with such electricity that it appears as if he is having an out-of-body experience. It is performance art. When the players come over after the game, there is a complete subversion of what some might see as football's natural order.
He provides the entertainment. The players become the spectators.
"The supporters are part of it here," says Christian Arbeit. "They feel like they are not just the guys who bring the money in but the most important part of the atmosphere."
Arbeit is the man nominally in charge of proceedings on a match-day. He is the press officer but also the stadium announcer. At times, it must feel like the easiest job in football.
"The very first time that I say anything as the stadium announcer is 20 minutes before kick-off. After that, that is it. We don’t have goal music or anything.
"We are different to most clubs. We think the stadium is a social melting pot. They are waiting two weeks to meet again. They come here, have their beer, their sausages, whatever, and first of all they talk about what has been going on for the last two weeks."
The music that fills those final 20 minutes is distinctly Union. The screeching voice of Nina Hagen, a popular punk singer born in East Berlin, provides its climax. The song? Eisern Union.
"It is quite well known in Germany but when players come to us they say that it feels absolutely different from any other club because you are never booed and always supported even in defeat. If you don’t win, that can happen. That is sport.
“For us, it is a little bit funny. What mostly makes us special are the views of other people who look at us and see us doing things differently to them. We are doing it how we like it.”
Arbeit has worked here since 2009 but he has been a fan since 1986. "Long before I ever imagined I could be working for the club," he says. As with Sweetman, a vocal supporter has been co-opted into the Union myth. He too believes in the power of that synergy.
"Our budget is still in the lower quarter of the Bundesliga. The stadium is the second smallest. There are a lot of factors that speak against us. But if you drew up the table based on what you spend per point we are always at the top of that table.
"We do not focus on the things that make us small.
"We focus on possible strengths and try to use them.
"It is something we think a lot about. In the most important positions at the club there are the same people and the same trust. The whole club is close. For example, the stadium is not only the stadium. It is the home of the first team. They train here.
"There is a big parking lot and on the other side is the stadium. I am sitting here now. The board are here. The president is here. The president is well connected to different fan groups, even the ultra-scene. He is good at moderating different views and expectations.
"We are good at not losing focus on where we came from and what is possible.
"When we first came up and won promotion, it was all about trying to stay in it. We did that and we did it in the second year and in the third year too. Of course, the longer that you stay in the Bundesliga, the better your chances of staying in it for even longer."
"They could even become champions." – Christoph Biermann
There was quite a moment recently when the Union squad congregated on the private air strip in Berlin for their trip to Malmo. It might have won sports photograph of the year in Germany had anyone had the presence of mind or sheer chutzpah to risk capturing it.
As Union prepared to take their next step in Europe, Lars Windhorst, owner of a 64.7 per cent stake in Hertha Berlin, was passing by in the other direction to cursory nods. The entrepreneur is currently trying to sell that stake, his time at the club deemed a failure.
For those at Union, that contrast is seductive. Could it be that they become the exception that proves the rule? The club that shows there is an alternative to rampant capitalism? A club that becomes more than the sum of its parts by cooperating to maximise their output?
"There is this fantasy," acknowledges Sweetman.
"I do wonder if it is an East German thing.
"Not really believing in the free market, in capitalism. A lot of people place a great deal of hope in that. It might not be at a conscious level. Nobody is calling for a return of communist but there are elements of the system that are not working for everybody.
"This is a real triumph of sensible planning, of remaining within your means. It cannot sustain itself forever. We are not going to win the Bundesliga five times in a row.
"But I think there is a big success coming."
As you might expect, the players are more cautious about expressing that view.
"There are so many games and so much left to do," says Ryerson. His approach? "Continue what we are doing now. Take the confidence that we get from these games and just keep on going. Do what we have done and only look one game ahead."
But there are even those outside Union who are prepared to think the unthinkable.
"They could even become champions if Bayern let them," says Biermann. "Bayern are by far – by far – the best team in the Bundesliga. But…"
"How can you do this without losing what makes the club special in the first place?" – Jacob Sweetman
Whether this adventure ends in unlikely triumph or not, there is a sense of a reckoning coming for Union one way or another because they find themselves in an unusual position.
Just as every cult hero dreams of becoming a mainstream success, so every mainstream success dreams of becoming a cult hero. How can Union really hope to be both?
"What happens next? It is the question I am asked most," says Sweetman.
"How can a club like Union, with this mythical outsider status, stick true to its roots and traditions, while expanding the fan base and becoming a Bundesliga club, a European club? How can you do that without losing what made it special in the first place?
"I don’t have an answer yet."
There are plans to expand the stadium capacity to 38,000. The only problems are logistical. The membership is already there. Union want a more diverse fan-base but that is largely prevented by the waiting list. Expansion would solve this but raise other questions.
"Will those people stay when it goes wrong?"
Failure forged Union. There is a pessimistic fear that success could spoil it.
"Those who have joined us after the stadium was built in 2009 have only enjoyed success," says Arbeit. "It has never stopped. Everything has moved forward."
What if it did not? What if Fischer lost five in a row and an expanded fan-base that had become accustomed to relentless progress began to grumble about performances?
"You now have a generation of new fans who are used to success," agrees Sweetman. "This is the first time for that at Union. When I first came 15 years ago, we were just coming back from the nadir, down in the Oberliga playing local Berlin clubs.
"How will the newer generation of fans deal with that inevitable time when there is not that success? It will really depend on how successful the club has been in letting people know our values. So far, the club have been very successful at doing this.
"What I have noticed is that people buy into that. People like it.
"If we have done our job correctly then it should not matter."
"There are a lot of people who understand the soul of the club. It is difficult to sustain that." – Christoph Biermann
It might seem curious that there is any unease at a moment like this. These are the best of times and yet there are those more comfortable with stoicism. There is a feeling here that memories are forged in the lows rather than the highs. "They have not had success to shout about," says Sweetman.
"There were an East German cup win in 1968 and there were a couple of promotions. There was a famous relegation game in Osnabruck that was lost on penalties. By the way, there are fans who will tell you it was their favourite game because there was that togetherness."
Maybe it is a Berlin thing. Amid the war tourism in the city, there are guides who will happily reminisce about the oh-so-brief golden age of the 1920s. "Most people were starving in the 1920s. They were not taking cocaine and going to cabaret," says Sweetman.
David Bowie came searching in the 1970s and thousands since have made the journey in the hope of being visited by that same divine inspiration. In the 1990s, this was the home of techno but nothing lasts forever.
Paris is always Paris, they say. Berlin is never Berlin.
Is this success an illusion? A mere moment in time. Results could turn in an instant. Even the spirit of the club is reliant on individuals. "It sounds romantic but there are a lot of people who understand the soul of the club," notes Biermann. "It is difficult to sustain that."
But Union’s ability to endure is not to be underestimated.
Not when Julian Ryerson and Christopher Trimmel are on the pitch, providing that connection and feeding off the energy emitted from the stands.
Not when capo Ali and Christian Arbeit are conducting the fans.
Not when Urs Fischer is conducting the team.
And not when Jacob Sweetman is here to share this club’s amazing stories.
As Nina Hagen sings, ‘We will live forever.’
Our love. Our team. Our pride. Our club.
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