A little more than half a year until the Olympic Games in Tokyo - then again across the republic there will be a lively discussion about taekwondo, rowing and fencing. Until then, football will remain Germany's number one sport. Or?
A data analysis by SPIEGEL paints a very differentiated picture: number of members of all regional associations and the number of spectators of the largest leagues provide information about which sports are particularly popular in which parts of the country. And there are some surprises.
Football and gymnastics dominate club sport
When looking at the number of members, Sport-Deutschland is divided into two parts: either gymnastics or kicking the ball. This is not surprising, because the German Gymnastics Association not only represents classic disciplines such as floor exercises, horizontal bars or bars, but also gymnastics games such as dodgeball and fistball. In addition, many popular sports such as children's gymnastics fall within the area of responsibility of the association.
MIRROR ONLINE
Football, on the other hand, benefits from its fans. In their reports, German associations do not separate passive and active members of a division. The active athlete counts as much as the fan, who primarily became a member for a ticket pre-sale right. No wonder that the greatest football dominance can be found in the Bundesliga cities of Gelsenkirchen, Mönchengladbach, Dortmund and Munich. Well over half of the registered sports club members belong to the soccer division.
Skiing, water sports, Frisian sports
There are a handful of counties, however, in which neither the soccer nor the gymnast federation has the most members. Few sports fans will be surprised to learn that skiing is a leader in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Every winter sports fan should be familiar with the venue for the New Year's jumping on the Four Hills Tournament and several disciplines of the Alpine Ski World Cup.
There is also a simple explanation for the fact that water sports dominate in Krefeld: SV Bayer Uerdingen is the largest swimming and water sports club in Germany. Almost 10,000 members swim at this regional base or practice one of the other water sports. So among other things also water polo. Here, the club provides a Bundesliga team for both men and women. The women even won seven championships in a row between 2012 and 2017 - they finished second in the past season.
The Lower Saxony district of Wittmund probably has the most unusual number one: Klootschießen and Boßeln . When shooting a Kloot, the athletes run towards a ramp, jump off it and try to throw a small ball as far as possible. The Frisian sport is centuries old and has been banned repeatedly by authorities in its long history.
In the past, the Klootschießen competitions took place only in frost and the participants only appeared dressed in undershirts and long underpants - kept warm by lots of schnapps. So the sport was accompanied by pneumonia and sometimes bloody clashes by drunk shooters. Later the team sport developed from the competitions, which is known in many places as Boßeln. The Klootschießen itself is still carried out today mainly in East Frisia and Oldenburg.
The reason that the disabled and rehab sport has the most reports in Cottbus, Gera and Leipzig is, among other things, that there are larger clubs that act as centers for entire regions. The offer of individual federal states also promotes the number of members: in Brandenburg, rehabilitation measures are mainly offered by non-profit associations, while there are more commercial providers in other federal states. Membership in the responsible association is not mandatory, but many patients opt for it.
City sports, east sports, successful sports
If you look at the sports individually, you can always discover strongholds or major regional trends. They often go hand in hand with successful clubs in the respective region.
You can roughly divide Germany into handball - and football regions - while the south and west are more football-dominated, most handball strongholds can be found in the north and east of the country. This division is only broken by locations of large clubs such as the handball clubs Balingen-Weilstetten in Baden-Württemberg or Lemgo in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The number of members in basketball is even closer to that of successful clubs . The sport has so far been a city phenomenon that also attracts a large number of athletes in DBL locations such as Bamberg, Frankfurt am Main and Oldenburg. The peaks are spread across the entire country, but hardly radiate to the surrounding regions.
MIRROR ONLINE
The strongest regional differences of all ball sports can be found in volleyball and tennis. Volleyball is traditionally much stronger in eastern Germany than in the west. Even if the sport originally came from the USA, it was dominated by the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries for decades.
In 1969, the SED decided in a competitive sports decision which sports should be promoted in the GDR and which should be neglected. Volleyball was among the sponsored sports and so the GDR men's team became world champion in 1970, the women's team in 1983 and European champions in 1987. The FRG, however, did not get a medal until reunification. Even today, the East German clubs SSC Palmberg Schwerin and Dresdener SC still represent the majority of the national team's women.
The consequences of the GDR sports policy
The regional distribution of other sports can also be explained with the competitive sports decision of the GDR. The sports supported at that time, judo and handball, are still particularly strong today in eastern federal states. Tennis , on the other hand, was removed from funding and is still a clearly West German sport today. While Boris Becker and Steffi Graf ensured a huge upswing in West German tennis, the 48-time GDR champion Thomas Emmerich was not allowed to travel to tournaments abroad. Tennis was not recognized as a competitive sport and, despite his skills, Emmerich was therefore not a professional.
The bowling sport defied the GDR's competitive sports resolution . As a non-Olympic sport, funding was also canceled here at the end of the 1960s. At the time, the GDR was one of the absolute world leaders in bowling. At their first World Cup participation in 1955, they won three out of four titles and won a total of 36 World Cup medals by 1972. After 1972, however, was over and the teams were no longer allowed to drive to international tournaments. The bowling success was dampened in this way - but the sport survived in grassroots sport. Even today, bowling is particularly high in Brandenburg, Saxony, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt.
MIRROR ONLINE
Regional priorities can also be identified for some of the other sports examined. Shooting festivals are part of everyday life, especially in Lower Saxony and Bavaria, and so a lot of athletes dedicate themselves to shooting sports . In contrast, equestrian sports are particularly popular in the north, in the regions of successful horse breeds - among the Hanoverians, Oldenburgers and Holsteiners.
Germany's colorful second row
At first glance, the football clubs dominate the number of spectators, of course - at least in the top. If you compare the average number of spectators of all sports clubs per home game, the first non-football club comes in 34th place: the Eisbären Berlin from the German Ice Hockey League. Nevertheless, football is far from number one in all cities.
There are currently a total of 261 sports clubs in 156 cities across Germany, which on average attract more than a thousand spectators per home game. Only a third of these are soccer teams. The remaining two thirds are divided between clubs from the handball, ice hockey, basketball, American football and tennis sectors. With Borussia Düsseldorf there is also a table tennis team with more than a thousand spectators.
Of the 156 cities with crowd pullers, soccer is number one in 69 cities. It is followed by handball (in 34 cities), ice hockey (24) and basketball (18). The bottom of the list are volleyball (6) and American football (5).
The teams of women are clearly lagging behind in almost every sport. On average, the ice hockey Bundesliga does not even get a hundred spectators per game, 800 are already a record set in basketball, and just five clubs in the football Bundesliga make it over the thousand spectator average.
The number of spectators at eye level is only in volleyball. The Dresden SC attracts more than 2,700 spectators per home game of the women and is therefore in first place among all women teams. In their own sport they only have to line up behind the men's team at the Berlin Recycling Volleys.
Only the sports with a league operation are included in the viewer statistics. In addition, of course, many individual events over the year reach impressive numbers of viewers. Around 20,000 spectators came to the Four Hills Tournament, the CHIO Aachen show jumping Grand Prix last saw around 40,000 and 71,000 racing fans came to the Hockenheimring last year on the race day of the German Formula 1 Grand Prix. At times, many more sports attract large crowds.
Not surprisingly, football dominates in the top Germany, Sport Germany is colorful in the second row and regionally diverse.
Where did the data come from?
The number of members of the individual districts is based on data from the sixteen regional sports associations and some regional sub-groups (sports associations, district sports associations, city sports associations). These were compiled and standardized in the naming and division of the divisions.
For Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the Saarland and the Sportbund Pfalz, no data are available broken down by district. Another special case is shooting sports in Bavaria: As the only federal state, the sports shooters are not members of the regional sports association and therefore fall out of the statistics. Instead, the figures from the Bavarian Sports Shooters' Association were used in this analysis, which is not organized in rural areas but in differently tailored and not comparable districts.
The audience figures come from the official pages of the leagues or associations.
How were passive and active members dealt with?
The various membership statuses could not be taken into account because the statistics of the German state sports associations do not distinguish between active and passive members. It is therefore conceivable that the proportions of the individual sports would change again when looking at the really active athletes. There are passive members in every sports club - but especially in cities with Bundesliga soccer clubs with a particularly large number of fans, the relationship to football can quickly change. For example: Hamburg SV alone has over 80,000 passive members, FC St. Pauli has over 20,000 - by contrast, the Hamburg Football Association has a total of only 150,000 members.
How were the different sports summarized?
According to our research, there are a total of more than 300 sports and disciplines that are recognized and reported by the various German state associations. In order to bring this into a uniform and clear form, we have used an official list to assign the sports to the various professional associations of the Bavarian State Sports Association. Sports that did not appear in this list were added and sorted according to the respective national associations.
Why is such a vague category like "gymnastics" used?
Gymnastics combine a variety of disciplines. In order to really be able to make a statement about individual sports, a further differentiation of this category would have been helpful. However, many state sports associations only collect the data at the level of the professional associations - and here in the German Gymnastics Association gymnastics games such as fistball and korfball are combined with other disciplines such as equipment gymnastics, parcours and children's gymnastics.
Why are sports missing in the membership statistics?
Basically, no sports are missing - but sports are invisible in the spongy main categories. Fistball, for example, is shown as a separate sport in only a few federal states. He usually ends up in the gymnastics category and is included in the statistics for the gymnastics area. Even statements about ice hockey can hardly be made at member level, since the sport is usually combined with other ice or roller sports.
What is the status of the data?
The number of spectators relates to the most recent, completely completed season - thus mostly to the 2018/2019 season and, for American football and tennis, to the 2018 season. The number of members varies depending on the state.
Baden-Württemberg: January 1, 2019
Bavaria: December 31, 2018
Berlin: 01/01/2018
Brandenburg: 01/01/2019
Bremen: August 2, 2018
Hamburg: October 1st, 2018
Hessen: 01.01.2019
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania: 01.01.2019
Lower Saxony: 01.01.2019
North Rhine-Westphalia: March 31, 2019
Rhineland-Palatinate: 01/01/2019
Saarland: May 31, 2019
Saxony: January 10, 2019
Saxony-Anhalt: 01.01.2018
Schleswig-Holstein: June 19, 2019
Thuringia: 01/01/2019
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/S7UVDTX7DREC7DXVCZN6MEKGBY.jpg)
