Director: Annekatrin Hendel (Germany). Year of Release: 2024
July 2023, the Alten Försterei. Union Berlin are about to play the match which will decide whether they will qualify for the Champions League. It has been a rapid rise. It’s less than 4 years since Union first qualified for the Bundesliga 1, and they have traditionally stood deep in the shadow of their more prosperous neighbours Hertha. We see little of the football (a recurring theme in this film), but soon Union have won, and are about to play Europe’s richest teams.
Cut back to 2021/2. Union are making their first venture into Europe – this time in the Europa League. If you are uninterested in sport, there’s no need to worry much. Any match footage appears almost as an afterthought. We occasionally see match results and see reports explaining what this means for the progress of the club, but this is very much secondary to a tv documentary-style introduction to the people who keep everything going.
One by one, we are introduced to the general staff. We probably spend most time with Stefanie Vogel, who runs the sales communication. Her job seems to consist mostly of finding which photos of in-game action work best for social media, or shifting around photos of players to make an aesthetically pleasing team photo. Vogler originally applied for a much more mundane job for the team, but her boss Susanne Kopplin (also responsible for team shirts) recognised a talent.
Also on screen is Katharina Brendel, who looks after the media and the players’ egos. Brendel must prepare the squad for interviews, which is not always as easy as it seems. We see a scene in which Brendel talks a player down after he was substituted much earlier than he wanted, so that he gives an on message statement to the press. If this were a richer club, we would be scoffing at the artificiality of it all. With Union, we believe the myth, and find ourselves willing them to survive.
This is an approved documentary, so there is no way of telling how much of the behaviour which we view on screen reflects reality. But you really get the impression that Union is not like other clubs. When players leave to more lucrative contracts with richer teams, the staff genuinely seem to express both a regret that they are leaving (“this club means so much to me that I would not leave for more pay”) and a desire that old friends will prosper in their new, and better paid, career.
This sentiment grows when Union qualifies for Europe. Board meetings discuss whether the club should organise flights for fans who otherwise just could not afford to follow their team. Of course they do. It is equally possible that we are being conned and many aspects are hidden from the cameras. But at least the attempt to show consideration for the fans is a slap in the face for anyone who believes that in football the only things that matter are profits and success.
For me, the best moment in the film is an interview with one of the female employees (mea culpa, I forget which one) at the height of the club’s success. She expresses a degree of nostalgia for the good old days when the team kept on losing but the fans carried on coming to matches. Now, it’s become a little too easy. Anyone can come along to watch a team winning all the time. You share her mixed emotions of enjoying the victory but fearing that the club is entering corporate hell.
The importance of Union Berlin goes way beyond simple football. There are certain teams which gain sympathy for underdog status for being in the shadow of their local rivals (TSV 1860 München spring to mind, but I also spent some time watching the Stuttgarter Kickers and SSV Reutlingen for a similar reason). Then there are those clubs with a cachet for being radical (most obviously FC St Pauli, though friends from Hamburg insist that Hamburger SV are the city’s real working class club).
But with Union more is at stake than relative poverty. Sure, Köpenick, home to the club’s humble stadium is much less salubrious than Charlottenburg, home of Hertha, traditionally the capital’s most successful club (who play in the Olympiastadion, where Leni Riefenstahl filmed Hitler’s 1936 Olympics). But Köpenick is also in the East, and Union’s recent success is seen by many as welcome revenge for the post-1989 destruction of Eastern industry to preserve Western profits.
It is not entirely a coincidence that many of the people running Union are women. We also observe a genuine revulsion at the idea of kit sponsors. Yes, Union is a capitalist enterprise, and no, the DDR was not a socialist paradise. Nonetheless there is a relative lack of compromises to accept the will of market forces. These compromises are made in the end, but they leave a much more sour taste in the mouth than at Hertha or Bayern München, who thrive as profit-making enterprises.
The result is that most of the people we meet in the film are much more sympathetic than most football characters. Club president Dirk Zingler may well be a logistics entrepreneur, whatever that is (and whatever it is, it doesn’t sound good), but we learn little about his business enterprises and much more about his recent victory in stopping smoking after 40 years. Whatever they are in real life, these do not seem to be people who are primarily motivated by profit.
The film’s main drawback is that it does not handle the football aspect quite right. Apparently, although director Annekatrin Hendel grew up near the Alte Försterei, she was never that interested in football. This is fair enough – that’s not what the film is primarily about, but it makes many of the live action films (borrowed from the podcast Taktik & Suff) almost cursory. There is just not enough drama or sense that what happens might be important – to some people at least.
Union – Die besten aller Tage is an interesting experiment – and I don’t mean this in a bad way. If there were a lot of this sort of film, it might become pretty boring too soon. It lives from a lack of excitement which allows us to concentrate on the unseen figures who actually do all the work. As a one-off, though, it is impressive and intriguing – a film like few others. Although, if you want a detailed chronicle of Union’s equally impressive recent history, you may have to look elsewhere.
CinePhil 