Football has perhaps become the last major issue we can all agree on. No one doubts that it can be seen as a reflection of society. But what do we actually see? A business in which money is the only thing that matters? A professional illusion machine that only sells lost childhood dreams and a sentimental sense of home? Or is football one of the last places where we can experience community?
For more than 25 years, Christoph Biermann has been writing about football; now he’s traced the relationship between football and life right to the source. To find answers, Christoph Biermann sets off on a journey home – back to the Ruhr region, where football and life are, to this day, more closely intertwined than anywhere else in the country. He pays a visit to the big-time football clubs of the Champions League in Dortmund and Schalke, as well as those in Wattenscheid and Herne, both of which have been left in the dust with nothing more than their memories of happier times. Everywhere he goes he encounters a strange obsession with the past.
Using the Ruhr region as an example, Christoph Biermann describes how football became the big story it is today. And he argues that the intense debates surrounding it are not just about football, but rather about how we want to live our lives.
