By the way...

5/4terl in Ehr’n

Presidents among themselves_ FIFA boss Gianni Infantino and DFB boss Neuendorf

(Bild: EPA)

In the latest edition of his column "Oh, by the way...", "Krone Vorarlberg" author Harald Petermichl takes a look at Leipzig. The 125th anniversary of the German Football Association was recently celebrated there. An event that attracted presidential celebrities from far and wide. Including FIFA boss Gianni Infantino, although he was a little late...

It has been called Büttnerstraße since 2001, but originally it was Leipzig's Karlstraße, where the restaurant "Zum Mariengarten" was once located before it fell victim to the wrecking ball in 1913. Today, a commemorative plaque on the building that now stands there reminds us that the German Football Association was founded there on January 28, 1900. Five quarters of a century of the DFB had to be duly celebrated, of course, and due to the lack of the Mariengarten, the ceremony was quickly moved to the Kongresshalle am Zoo. Many gentlemen in dark suits and even a few ladies came together to celebrate the occasion in style. Even Lise Klaveness, the President of the Norwegian Football Association and a fierce opponent of Infantino, had been invited and had the opportunity to talk to the German Chancellor and Infantino himself, who, as Marcus Bark put it, "has ruled FIFA for years in a way that would make Olaf Scholz jealous".

The four-time world champion celebrated his 125th birthday.

(Bild: REUTERS)

Little Gianni read the "kicker"
In addition to all kinds of gifts from guests, there was of course plenty of room for lavish celebratory poetry. Aleksander Ceferin declaimed that the DFB had "always been at the heart of the wonderful journey of soccer" and Infantino got carried away in his carnival speech to say that he loved soccer all over the world, but "especially German soccer". After all, he had already read "kicker" as a child. At least Bernd Neuendorf mentioned the "shameful history of the association" during the Nazi era, at least in passing, while the problem of turbo-capitalist tendencies in soccer was dismissed by means of a 25-year-old (!) video with admonishing words from the late former president Egidius Braun, who had spoken at the time of an "attempt by capital to seize soccer". So it no longer seems to be a major problem.

DFB president with a perfect counterattack
Nothing out of the ordinary for an event of this kind, had it not been for the competition for the worst joke of the evening (surprisingly not included in the program). Gianni Infantino had set the bar pretty high here shortly after his late arrival with the sentence "Sorry, sorry, sorry, I had to go to the hairdresser", but ran into a perfect counterattack from DFB President Neuendorf shortly before the end of the event, whose trenchant statement "Football belongs to those who love it and not to those who think they can buy it" could not be bettered with the best will in the world.