The international football calendar is becoming more and more, leaving little space for those non -competitive matches that are traditionally known as “friendlies” and are considered “a waste of time” by a number and media. It is a mistake to rule them as useless. These coincidences are first, and if many of them are more than anodinos, they have no less symbolic dimension. Playing with each other is an act of exchange, shared pleasure or trust. It is a statement about equality before the laws of the game. And in the case of football, which is often (if it were context) compared to “war less the shooting” and whose vocabulary is plagued by Belicosis terms, a friendly is also a statement or confusion of peace. Germany has just played the number 1000 game of its history. Enough milestone. In Europe, only England has made it better (1043), after having started 26 years before, with the famous (without goals) first “international” against Scotland.
At the time Germany created a national team, in 1908 (start with a 3-5 defeat against Switzerland), it was a “Kaiserreich” Under Prussian leadership (which by the way explains why white and black are the traditional colors of the Nationalmannschaft). Since then, the team has been overloaded with symbolic weight. Not only in the numerous international competitions, in which it did quite well, in general, but also in certain “friendly”, which were organized under the sign of peace. Three of them deserve to be mentioned.
The first is the number 199. It took place on November 22, 1950. Switzerland is the first to accept to play a “friendly” in a country that has been expelled from international football for long years and excluded from the first postwar world cup. The climatic conditions in Stuttgart are miserable that autumn day, but in the place built for 60,000 spectators, and under the name of “Adolf-Hitler-Kampfbahn”, a multitude of 110,000 people got into the stadium, Covering every centimeter of space until the side lines. In terms of security, starting the game, nothing less than irresponsible, but the collective thirst for symbolic recognition and reintegration in the international football community is too strong. As if the newborn Republic finally had a child or a baptismal ceremony.
Five years later, the 230th party takes place in the summer, on August 21, 1955. Everything has changed. The Federal Republic is not only occupied achieving its “economic miracle” or the postwar decades, but the Nationalmannschaft He has even won, to everyone’s surprise, the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland. The cold war has pushed NATO to acceleration. Membership in Western German And, constantly, it has allowed the new member to begin to travel, as of May 1955.
However, there is an open painful question: what will happen to the Approximately 15,000 prisoners of warSoldiers and civilians, which are still retained, ten years after the war, in the forced laboratory camps of the Soviet Union Bajo, say: “problematic” conditions? Foreign Minister Konrad Adenauer is planning a visit to the Kremlin to request and negotiate his release. And football proves the ground, just before his trip, with a “friendly” played by the renowned world champions in Moscow. A good opportunity to see how viewers will behave. The teams are very aware of the symbolic nature of their mission. Both enter the ground with bouquets of flowers, which distribute to the crowd. Finally, there is no incident to deplore, quite the opposite. Both Kremlin and the Chamber are relieved and go to Welcoming Adenauer for conversations. Between October and January, all the remuneration prisoners return home.
Match number 1000 Tok Place on June 12, 2023, in Bremen. To mark this exceptional moment in an 115 -year history scored by many milestones recorded in the popular collective memory, the German Federation had the elegant idea of inviting Ukraine. The election was made, according to its president, Bernd Neúendorf, “,”To send a clear sign in favor of peace and understanding, and against war. “In an event in early May, I ran into the Legend of Ukrainian football Andriy Chevtchenko, which passed through Paris. The income of matches announced to social and humanitarian beneficial organizations that work in Ukraine.”
Of course, it is not totally wrong: the organization of a football match, whatever its symbolic weight, does not allow an armed conflict against a powerful aggressor. At the same time, an invitation to a “friendly” so “friendly” that it is not exempt from prestige and a degree of solemnity, gives a specific meaning, accessible to all, or a commitment to solidarity with the nation to which it is addressed. That is not exempt from importance. It seems that friends can be “useless” in most cases, but some of them are more than significant, regardless of the score.
Professor of European Studies, Phd of Sociology
Essca School of Management
Blog posts represent the author’s opinions and not those of Sports & EU or their members members
