Football Nomad

It’s Saturday morning, just after 10am and I’m about to head out to Alexanderplatz.

Why? It’s Berlin Derby Day and the FC Union fans are in town. All 20,000 of them, with European Football Weekends’ editor Danny Last among them.

On Saturday myself and a couple of other friends meet up with Berlin Nomad Sid to watch Bayern Munich beat St. Pauli 3-0 at the Oberbaumeck Haus in Kreuzberg, Berlin.

Last summer Cameroonian striker Mohammadou Idrissou left German club SC Frieburg for Borussia Mönchengladbach. On his exit he made the bold and critical statement: “I want to play in the Champions League next year and I don’t want to play with you losers anymore.” As luck would have it, last weekend Freiburg thumped Mönchengladbach 3-0 [...]

An unfortunate peculiarity of writing exclusively online is that I rarely get to meet the people that I connect and share ideas with on a daily basis. One of the overriding reasons for my move to Germany, aside from being closer to European football culture, was to make real-life connections with those very people.

So it gave me great pleasure to play host to my favourite football photographer, Paris-based Ryu Voelkel, over the weekend.

Last night my lovely new German friend Sid, who I met watching Arsenal v Bolton at The Oscar Wilde Pub earlier in the season, was kind enough to take me along to the Türkiyemspor clubhouse in Kreuzberg to watch the Euro 2012 qualifier between Germany and Turkey. For those that don’t know, Berlin is home [...]