For the kids in Oderbruch, the football club is their life. Then the sponsor is murdered. The detectives from "Polizeiruf" investigate on the sidelines.

Sport is murder: These three words don't appear in the script for the new episode of "Polizeiruf 110." That would be the wrong message for a football thriller. Nevertheless, Detective Inspector Vincent Ross (André Kaczmarczyk) of the cross-border Swiecko police station thinks of nothing else. This is clearly written on his sophisticated brow as he cautiously navigates this mixture of sweat, stress, and peer pressure on the dingy grounds of the German-Polish Pilkarski football club in Kostrzyn.

His colleague, Chief Inspector Alexandra Luschke (Gisa Flake), has far fewer problems with the male world of the club. She even develops something almost like maternal feelings for the pubescent boys of the youth team, who are being drilled for the next tournament and even have to wear the name "Briegel" on their blue and white club shirts during the official qualifying match. It is the name of the murder victim.

The viewer only gets to know Olivia Briegel, nicknamed the "Ice Queen," as a corpse—and, of course, through the reports gathered during the investigation. She was said to have been athletic, young, beautiful, resilient, successful, and obviously extremely unpopular, except, of course, with her latest lover.

He's just a low-level employee at the local scaffolding company, whose boss Olivia has just become. As such, she was the club's main sponsor. She lived on the German side of the border town and made money on the Polish side. She had just cut off the funding for football in Kostrzyn due to persistent failure. She was also the single mother of the thirteen-year-old, freckled defender Marco Briegel (Len Blankenberg), nicknamed "Pit Bull."

A quiet boy, he has a tough life. His father doesn't want to know anything about him, his mother neglected him, and he almost seems happy that she's now dead. His two best friends also come from broken homes: Robert, the sweeper, grew up with an abusive father, while Kevin, the striker, grew up with his unsuspecting grandmother. It's understandable that the football club is their life, their home and their hope.

So, a lot of the milieu is laid out. The film offers little action. The sky hangs low over the melancholy landscape of the drained Oderbruch, and the investigations are correspondingly slow. While any number of murder motives are conceivable and warrant further investigation, they are, as expected, falsified one after the other, because all of these more or less failed people have ironclad alibis, the murder weapon remains missing, and the crime scene remains unknown for a long time. But who the hell was so angry at this immigrant from the West that they beat her twenty or thirty times with heavy equipment? And then tied her up in plastic bags like a mummy?

Inspector Ross, a clever, sensitive soul in a designer silk shirt, first develops the theory of an "overkill" murder of passion. Inspector Luschke, with both feet firmly planted in reality, quickly realizes: This doesn't fit into the aforementioned elegiac milieu. Ross's second theory, which cannot be proven, is based precisely on this milieu. Meanwhile, the camera's gaze repeatedly wanders perplexedly over the beautiful emptiness of the river landscape. When, from the waters of the Oder, a diver finally retrieves the murder weapon and triumphantly holds it up to the gray sky, things begin to move. And real tears actually flow.

“Polizeiruf 110”: “Playing against the ball,” Sunday, 8:15 p.m. on ARD.