Date/Time
Date(s) - July 5, 2024
8:00 pm
Categories
See TV channel and live streaming information for Friday’s UEFA European Championship 2024 match as Spain takes on Germany at 12:00 PM at …
Germany vs Spain: Euro 2024 quarterfinal reopens east-west football divide
Of the 10 host cities staging UEFA Euro 2024, only one is in the former East Germany – and that venue is not being used for any finals match. Can the playing field be levelled?
Berlin, Germany – Host nation Germany will meet tournament favourites Spain in the business end of the Euro 2024 football tournament with a crucial semifinal spot at stake in Stuttgart.
With a doubling of beer and bratwurst sales on its national rail provider and an expected boost of 1 billion euros ($1.08bn) to a shaky German economy, the hosts look set for a win whatever the result on Friday evening.
KEEP READING
list of 2 items
list 1 of 2
Meet the fastest woman in Iran, setting records on and off the track
list 2 of 2
Can you play competitive basketball in France? Not if you wear a hijab
end of list
Yet beyond some of the bigger headlines, the tournament has shone a spotlight on how German football today is still shaped by the legacies of its divided history.
It’s noteworthy that as the Euro 2024 quarterfinals are played on Friday and Saturday, not even one of the four matches – or the resulting semifinals or the final – will be staged in the former East Germany. The west is best, it seems, when showcasing Europe’s largest football tournament as it reaches its zenith.
Of the 10 cities that have hosted Euro 2024 matches, including Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Dortmund, only one club stadium is in a part of the country that formed part of the former East Germany – Leipzig RasenBallsport, known as RB Leipzig.
Yet even this club was formed controversially two decades after German reunification in a commercial takeover by the giant Austrian global soft drinks maker Red Bull. Although legal, it was an unpopular move amid Germany’s unique fan-majority ownership structure, known as 50-1.
Additionally only one player in the current German squad – 34-year old midfielder Tony Kroos, who is set to retire from football after the tournament – was born in the now-defunct communist German Democratic Republic, or GDR as it’s more commonly known.
The Deutscher Fussball-Bund (DFB) – the German Football Association – didn’t respond to questions on its efforts to address any post-reunification historical gaps or the selection criteria used for host cities and stadium geography for Euro 2024, which was the first major football tournament staged in Germany since the 2006 FIFA World Cup and only the second one since Germany’s 1990 unification. It instead pointed Al Jazeera to UEFA stadium size requirements for hosting bids and how its application was built around that.
