'Matchdays: The Hidden Story of the Bundesliga', by Ronald Reng

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 10 Απριλίου 2015 - 16:18

It's a Saturday night in West Germany in the early 1970s, and Bochum's professional football team has gathered at their manager's house. Heinz Hoher has the very latest must-have: his own party cellar with a bar. The turntable plays the hits of the moment. When Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" comes on, the women throw their fists in the air, and unwilling men are dragged on to the impromptu dance floor. Nobody dares to make the reserved Hoher dance. But in that forgotten moment in an almost forgotten football manager's life, writes Ronald Reng, "Heinz Hoher was happy. Those two beers and a shot cleared the block in his throat."

Reng is a leading German writer of novels and non-fiction. Matchdays, which tells the story of postwar German football through Hoher's life, won Germany's NDR Kultur non-fiction book award for 2013. The book is too long, and yet it's welcome because everyday life in postwar Germany remains a neglected subject in English.

Hoher and Reng first met when the ex-manager showed up uninvited on the writer's doorstep in Barcelona. Hoher was carrying "a neon-yellow 1980s Adidas rucksack" that had belonged to a son who died in a car crash. It was packed with documents covering Hoher's various incarnations in football: promising 1960s winger, rising manager, alcoholic, and finally obsessive youth coach. Hoher then began writing letters to Reng, and the writer also interviewed dozens of Hoher's surviving contemporaries.

Born in the industrial Ruhr region in 1938, Hoher grew up in the Federal Republic with a clear picture of what a Real Man is: a silent, enigmatic, Hemingwayesque figure who can hold his drink. He loved words on paper, and tried to write (he ended up filling his cellar with unsold copies of his self-published children's book) but in the manly world of football, he rarely spoke. He needed Reng to tell his story for him.

Like most lives in football, Hoher's was filled with disappointment. When he was 20, he was picked for the West German national squad for a match in Scotland, but had to stay home because his passport was unavailable. West Germany never picked him again. Shortly after, he hurt a knee in a one-off attempt at skiing, lost his acceleration, and played out his career as a journeyman.

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He became a manager, did well at Bochum, had spells in Greece and, in the 1980s, was building a promising young Nuremberg team when he let himself be kicked upstairs as general manager. Soon, his inability to communicate did for him. Aged 50, he was tossed out of the Bundesliga, Germany's national league, never having reached the pinnacle that he had forever been targeting. That's how football usually works. In fact, Hoher had a longer ride than most football men.

For 25 years now, Hoher has watched, mostly embittered, not even on the sidelines but usually in front of his television set, as German football has become richer and more glamorous and (recently) wonderful. Yet he cannot stop dreaming: now he hopes that a player he coached from the age of 12 will make it back into the Bundesliga, and thereby avenge him.

This book is at its best when it abandons the endless litany of wins and defeats, and instead offers unexpected glimpses of German football history. There's the day Hoher and his staff deliberately ice Bochum's field so that a match will be postponed and played later in a bigger stadium where the club can sell more tickets. There are the ritual negotiations about backhanders and, once, a small pile of banknotes for throwing a match. There are the letters that Hoher writes to a local newspaper under assumed names, trying to undermine a journalist who is attacking him.

And there is the relentless moralising by Germans about football. Because of national guilt about Nazism, Reng explains, "even apolitical issues such as the founding of the Bundesliga were looked at through the lens of morality". Many Germans thought that footballers shouldn't be paid much; that football shirts shouldn't carry advertising; or that the great Franz Beckenbauer shouldn't live with a woman who wasn't his wife. And when 1971's match-fixing scandal erupted, ensnaring several of Hoher's mates, an upwardly mobile nation sneered at the "pleb" sport (while quietly continuing to watch it).

There is something heroic in Hoher's story. He comes through the sackings, the spectacular miscalculations, the tragedy, drink, gambling, and ever-changing visions of modernity, and at the end of the book we find him in his seventies, still standing. He has avoided the gutter, and even acquired bits of wisdom. Telling his story to Reng taught him about himself. "And I have to say that I've pretty well lost any respect for myself," Hoher concludes. When he recalls sitting beside his children while they did their homework "like a silent menace, instead of helping them", he slides his hand over his eyes.

There was good stuff in that yellow rucksack. Yet Reng should have selected more ruthlessly. Even after more than 400 pages, Hoher remains a somewhat shadowy presence. James Hawes' translation usually captures the lucid simplicity of Reng's prose, but has its clunky moments. Reng's great contribution to football literature remains A Life Too Short, his prizewinning 2011 book about the goalkeeper Robert Enke, who committed suicide.

Matchdays: The Hidden Story of the Bundesliga, by Ronald Reng, translated by James Hawes, Simon & Schuster, RRP£18.99, 448 pages

Simon Kuper is an FT columnist

[email protected]@KuperSimon

Photograph: Werner Otto/Ullstein Bild

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