Club World Cup | SV Darmstadt 98: The worst club in the civilized world

No, no, we won't let anyone take away our dissension! The next opponent must be taken seriously. We in the stands are playing along, after all, and so the next opponent is always the most despicable opponent in the world. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is! The fact that I have to deal, albeit reluctantly, with SV Darmstadt 98, a football club that's 2,000 kilometers from the nearest sea in any direction, is only because the goddamn DFB recently drew us against this team in its DFB Cup: The match is in mid-August, VfB Lübeck vs. Darmstadt 98, and we will dispose of the so-called lilies from our traditional Lohmühle without a trace!

It's bad enough that the pride of the North has to compete with teams from the Central European no-man's-land because of historical aberrations. In a sane world, Lübeck would still be a free imperial city, a status that the dictator Adolf Hitler, who came from the greater Darmstadt area, took away from us after more than 700 years. A league befitting the Queen of the Hanseatic League would be one with clubs from our vassal cities: Hamburger SV, Werder Bremen, Malmö FF, Brann Bergen, Riga FC, Lechia Gdańsk, Arsenal London, Standard Liège, Hansa Rostock.

If there is anything more repulsive and alien to the spirit of Lübeck than Darmstadt 98, it is the so-called DFB, which forces us to send our magnificent team into senseless battles with teams from cowsheds in mountain regions, and we only go along with it because without cup income, the next bankruptcy is virtually certain.

Darmstadt 98 – I won't comment on the name of this city or this club; I'll leave that to the hooligans from our incomparable Pappelkurve, who will use pyrotechnics to convert all cup revenue into VfB fines, which will then make the goddamn DFB rich and fat again, well, yeah.

Darmstadt 98, in any case, is a distant memory from the most uncertain times of my childhood, a jarring dissonance in my newly burgeoning football enthusiasm, a visceral insult to the innocent dream every fan holds in their heart: that the little ones can also be the big ones someday. I had just discovered that a Bundesliga existed, around 1978, when there was a surprise club there that no one had believed until the first kickoff, and which had now, somehow, landed in the Bundesliga from the 2nd League South: That was Darmstadt 98, wherever that might be – the most famous players were Peter Cestonaro, Gundolf Cestonaro, and Willibald Cestonaro.

This club carried all the hopes, all the illusions, the belief in change, in freedom and transcendence on its shoulders, which turned out to be wilted lily leaves. Every week. Every damn Saturday they played there, and every Saturday they were trampled, crushed, and crushed. 5-0 in Bielefeld. 7-1 at home against Stuttgart. What good are underdogs if they let themselves be taken apart without a second thought? SV Darmstadt 98 is, quite unquestionably, the worst club in the civilized world; and outside the civilized world, below Darmstadt, only Holstein Kiel comes second.

Klaus Ungerer is a lifelong fan of VfB Lübeck.