The commemorative garden tucked away in a small corner of Borussia Monchengladbach’s former home feels to be a worthy homage to a fondly remembered stadium.
Built in 2019 to mark the centenary of the Bokelbergstadion being opened, there’s a solitary mini-floodlight looking down on a patch of artificial turf, complete with pitch markings. A sculpture featuring cheering fans under a replica scoreboard can also be found in an area that today doubles as a popular playground for local toddlers.
The nod to the sporting past in this corner of north-west Germany is a step up from the fate that befalls most lost English football grounds, where developers have often done the bare minimum to honour what had once been integral parts of a community’s social fabric. The trait goes all the way to the top: barely a trace of the original Wembley Stadium was left after its redevelopment from 2003-07.
Sure, metal plaques now indicate where the centre spot was at, for example, Maine Road, Manchester City’s one-time home, and Huddersfield Town’s former Leeds Road ground. And, yes, the areas of housing that replaced Sunderland’s Roker Park and Ayresome Park in Middlesbrough include football-related street names such as ‘Promotion Drive’ and ‘Midfield Close’, along with a couple of arty sculptures to mark the passing of Derby County’s Baseball Ground and the Manor Ground, Oxford.
But, really, these do scant justice to what were effectively places of worship to generations, especially as a sizeable number of supporters still feel a sense of loss 20 or even 30 years after their club decamped to new digs elsewhere.
Monchengladbach’s commemorative garden makes a decent fist of honouring the Bokelberg, an atmospheric ground that witnessed many of the city’s finest football moments, including five Bundesliga titles in a 1970s heyday when Gunter Netzer, Rainer Bonhof and Berti Vogts ruled the roost.
It is what lies just a short stroll away, however, that truly brings back to life a stadium that closed in 2004 and was finally demolished two years later. Here, just beyond the upmarket housing estate that has since been built over a decent chunk of where the pitch once stood, Bokelberg’s famous steep bowl has been preserved on three sides.
Two small sections of terracing have also been saved, complete with a smattering of crush barriers, along with the western fringe of the pitch. Stand here on a winter’s afternoon and it’s still possible to picture Netzer and Co out there bewitching the opposition.
It’s an evocative tribute that’s far from a one-off in Germany. Leipzig’s Red Bull Arena, for instance, was built within the walls of the city’s old 100,000-capacity Zentralstadion in a similar fashion to how the neo-classical exterior at Soldier Field was preserved in the early 2000s when the inside of the stadium — home to the NFL’s Chicago Bears since 1924 — was redeveloped extensively.
With the distinctive oval shape that was a near uniform feature of post-war Soviet bloc stadia having been retained in Leipzig, it means fans today enter the ground by walking down steps where an estimated 120,000 people watched East Germany take on Wales in 1957.
Adding to the rich sense of history at a venue that hosted World Cup 2006 and Euro 2024 matches is how the old stadium’s grand entrance and 42m (137ft) clock tower were also incorporated into the new design.
Back in Germany’s industrial north, Borussia Dortmund’s old ground also survives, next door to the 81,000-capacity Westfalenstadion, while not one but two former homes of Schalke remain in nearby Gelsenkirchen.
These help maintain a link with the past that simply doesn’t exist for so many English supporters, save for how the listed East Stand still stands proudly on Avenell Road in north London having been converted into flats as part of Highbury’s redevelopment following Arsenal’s 2006 move to the Emirates Stadium.
Simon Inglis, the UK’s foremost stadium expert, suggests a simple explanation for such a contrasting state of affairs.
“Germany has a completely different system to the one we have in this country,” says Inglis, author of the seminal book, The Football Grounds of Great Britain. “Namely, public ownership of the stadium.
“Whereas in Britain stadiums have usually been privately owned, in Germany — and the majority of France, Italy, Austria, Hungary and, to an extent, Scandinavia — sports facilities are owned and financed by the local authority. Now, things are changing, with parts of Europe moving towards the privatised stadium (model). But, (previously) it was part of their taxation. In return, those facilities were open to the public.”
With clubs needing to raise as much revenue as possible from the sale of a privately-owned old ground to finance the new one and developers then having to cover that outlay, it is perhaps understandable that little tangible remains of Britain’s lost sports venues, bar those token plaques and street names.
Nevertheless, looking around Monchengladbach’s old Bokelberg, it still feels like a crying shame.
Not only does what remains of a ground that boasted three steep open terraces serve as a useful green space today for the locals. It keeps alive the memory of those days when this previously provincial club went toe-to-toe with Bayern Munich, the two winning every Bundesliga title between them for nine seasons from 1968-69.
Their home today is Borussia Park, a 55,000-capacity stadium five or so miles away on the south-west fringes of the city. But fans regularly still make the pilgrimage up Bokel Hill to a place where arguably the club’s finest performance took place in 1971, when Inter Milan were thrashed 7-1 in the first leg of a European Cup second round tie that was subsequently scrubbed from the record books.
A Coca-Cola can thrown from the crowd that hit Inter player Roberto Boninsegna lay behind the annulment by UEFA, European football’s governing body, the Italians grasping this second chance via a 4-2 aggregate victory after the replayed first leg, held weeks on from that six-goal ‘decider’ at San Siro and moved to Berlin, had ended in a 0-0 draw.
There were no discarded drinks cans — or litter of any sort — to be found on The Athletic’s recent visit. A mark perhaps of the respect locals have for this hallowed ground.
Likewise, 45 or so miles to the east in Gelsenkirchen, where Schalke’s heritage has been similarly honoured by preserving both the club’s spiritual home of Gluckauf-Kampfbahn and Parkstadion, its out-of-town successor used between 1973 and 2001.
There’s little doubt which of the two is most fondly remembered by supporters, even those old enough to have only watched the club at their current Arena AufSchalke home over the past 20-odd years.
Built on the site of a former pit amid rows of houses where coalminers once lived in the Schalke district of the city, Gluckauf-Kampfbahn hosted the club’s most successful era, as seven German championships were won in the days before the mid-1960s advent of the Bundesliga.
Named after the traditional greeting between miners before starting a shift underground — ‘Gluckauf’ loosely means ‘Good luck’ — the venue was designed to hold 35,000 but crowds peaked at almost double that.
Hence, the eventual move north to the 62,000-capacity Parkstadion, seen as an act of sacrilege by many long-standing supporters.
The footballing gods seem to agree, with Schalke not having won the league title again since decamping from a neighbourhood still closely associated with the club today via several supporters’ bars and even the ‘Schalker Meile’, a mile-long walking trail honouring legendary former players along with key historical sites.
Gluckauf-Kampfbahn’s three terraces were removed in the 1980s and replaced by earth banks that at least retained the ground’s shape. But the main stand, rebuilt in 1946 with two covered terraces either side of the wooden seating, survives along with the iconic entrance, on Caubstrasse, which is undergoing a welcome refurbishment.
This means, when leaning on the crush barriers that can be found on the two thin strips of preserved terracing that sit across an artificial pitch from the rustic brick main stand, you are enjoying a view that would be familiar to those thousands who packed the ground out during Schalke’s glory days.
A similar sense of history exists at Parkstadion, a giant bowl with an athletics track and three open sides in its heyday that was built for the West Germany-hosted 1974 World Cup at a cost of 54million Deutschmarks (DM) to the public purse.
Schalke lasted less than 30 years at the largely unloved venue, which for a long time sat in isolation to the north of the city. Its big neighbour today is, ironically, their state-of-the-art — and to use the name its sponsors would prefer — Veltins Arena, built on club-owned land as they stepped away from the traditional German model of local authority ownership.
A glance from one to the other explains why the move was necessary, with the retained stand that ran down one side of the Parkstadion looking very rudimentary compared to its sleek, modern replacement with its retractable fibreglass roof.
Still, the surviving bank of wooden bench seats, with a small terrace at either end, remains a welcome sight for those who value heritage in football. Keeping one of the four giant floodlights that used to tower over the site is, again, a nice touch.
Several perfectly groomed pitches stretch into the distance when gazing out from a banking that witnessed Yugoslavia running riot at that 1974 World Cup when thrashing Zaire 9-0. These are now home to Schalke’s various youth teams and the reserves, just as the more cramped but cosy Gluckauf-Kampfbahn hosts the women’s team.
A similar setup can be found in Dortmund, where the Rote Erde Kampfbahn, the club’s home until 1974, sits snugly in the shadow of its successor, the Westfalenstadion.
Initially built to hold 54,000 fans, the DM33million funding for a stadium now best known for the giant Yellow Wall terrace — where up to 25,000 fans, invariably clad in the club colours of yellow and black, gather behind one goal — came from a mixture of federal government, the local authority and the city.
A small fraction of that was used to refurbish Rote Erde, whose rustic stone perimeter walls contrast sharply with its towering steel and concrete neighbour. Very much like Schalke’s spiritual home in design, there are three open terraces and a small main stand with those watching from behind each goal a good distance from the action thanks to an athletics track.
It all survives to provide Dortmund’s reserve and women’s teams with a base. As Inglis points out in his 1990 book Football Grounds of Europe, this is something of a minor miracle as excavation work in 1970 for the Westfalen next door revealed the presence of 34 unexploded Second World War bombs on the site.
No such problems dogged the construction of Munich’s Olympiastadion for the 1972 Games.
The largest sports stadium in West Germany when it was first built and possessing a spider’s web style roof that was always more eye-catching than practical, it, too, remains in use despite Bayern and 1860, the stadium’s two football-club tenants, leaving 19 years ago for the Allianz Arena on the city’s northern outskirts. In 2017, 1860 Munich returned to the Grunwalder Stadion.
Coldplay and Taylor Swift performed concerts here as recently as this summer, and it hosted the track and field events in the European Championships in 2022.
Work on maintaining that iconic roof has been going on for some time but the stadium will close next year for a full refurbishment that is expected to take around 18 months. Among the planned works on this listed structure are upgraded floodlights and safety technology to bring a venue that has hosted four European Cup/Champions League finals, the final of that 1974 World Cup and the European Championship final in 1988 firmly into the 21st century.
Another feather in the cap for Germany and how the country proactively preserves its proud sporting heritage.
