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Fritz Keller looking for a dialogue with football
Photo:
Reinaldo Coddou H. / Getty Images for DFB
Oberbergen am Kaiserstuhl, 1000 inhabitants, is the home of the emerald lizard and Fritz Keller.
Keller calls his home "paradise", he raves about the emerald lizard, the praying mantis and the bee-eater, all of them animals that have already died out elsewhere in Germany.
He stands on the terrace of his own winery, points across the slopes, points to the orchids that grow there under nature protection, the inevitable wine glass in hand, and tells of this sun-drenched patch of earth in the deep southwest with a passion and verve, that he prefers not to stop at all.
Those are the moments when you can no longer imagine that the President of the German Football Association is speaking here.
On Sunday, Keller is at the helm of the DFB for exactly one year, and he still looks a bit exotic.
"Even after a year, my view is still an outside view," he said in an interview with the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", and this is how the 63-year-old, award-winning winemaker and restaurateur is still perceived by many.
Fritz Keller and the DFB - this is still a relationship on trial.
The president often speaks of "cultural change", hardly an interview in which the word does not appear: Keller values sustainability, that was what his job as a winegrower taught him, the DFB, this thick ship of officials, the largest national football association in the world, should change, he should become more feminine, more environmentally conscious, ideally thinking generations ahead.
A national team that gets on a plane in Stuttgart to cover 180.08 kilometers as the crow flies to Basel doesn't fit into the picture at all.
Keller was very angry about this, and he made that clear in public.
But it is also a sign of the limits of Keller's influence - a limit that is tough on the national team.
Bierhoff is the strong man
The strong man in Frankfurt am Main is the director of national teams, Oliver Bierhoff.
He is responsible for the DFB Academy, and for 16 years he has had time to build up a house power on the Otto-Fleck-Schneise.
Before Keller took office, the guidelines authority of the DFB President was curtailed, an experience from the unsuccessful tenure of his predecessor Reinhard Grindel.
More than any DFB boss before, Keller is more representative than power man, a football president.
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Fritz Keller invites you to his winery, here the Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann
Photo: Philipp von Ditfurth / picture alliance / dpa
Keller's public appearances have to be all the more correct.
But here he has so far at best a mixed record.
Many remember Keller's appearance in the ZDF sports studio after the disputes between fans and officials over Dietmar Hopp escalated.
Keller clearly took one side back then, and that wasn't the fans' side.
Everyone who expected a compensatory DFB President here was disappointed.
But as an advocate of the Ultras, he had never been seen in his nine years as club president of SC Freiburg.
One has the impression that here he lacks access, the distance to his living environment: too great.
On the other side of the football spectrum, too, he made no great friends: When he denounced the "grossness of football" in an interview with SPIEGEL, he was immediately hit with a counterattack by Bayern boss Karl-Heinz Rummenigge.
The DFB president shouldn't be so populist.
In other areas, Keller's commitment is more credible, also more visible: He has set the first signs to advocate the advancement of women in the association: With Miriam Berle he has hired a new media director, the long-time media director Ralf Köttker had to leave.
Stefanie Schulte, who looks after the issues of "social responsibility" at the association, is one of his closest advisors alongside Secretary General Friedrich Curtius.
Now and then the "cultural change" can be felt
Social responsibility - there is something that Keller wants to put far more at the center of his work than his predecessors Grindel and Wolfgang Niersbach.
Keller publicly supports the fact that footballers position themselves against racism or against climate destruction.
The DFB is no longer playing down its Nazi past under the table, it has been a long way in this regard from the former incumbents Peco Bauwens and Hermann Neuberger to Fritz Keller.
Nowhere is the "cultural change" that Keller is striving for as noticeable as here.
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Keller wants cultural change, it is not already evident everywhere
Photo: Uli Deck / picture alliance / dpa
Elsewhere, things are progressing more slowly, the coming to terms with the summer fairy tale affair has been stalling for years, but should now be tackled more intensely, Keller has promised results soon.
The structure of the 3rd division remains a building site.
After all, the legacy of the now infamous than famous marketer Infront has been cleared away, and after months of dispute a settlement has been reached.
The president said he was "dissatisfied" with his first year, that things were still too bogged down: "Times are changing, the DFB is changing" is his mantra.
Corona has slowed down or stopped some things in this regard, he says.
The virus has undoubtedly overshadowed Keller's term of office since March, to use this exceptional situation and to show presence, but he did not understand that, but his DFL antipode, the cool manager Christian Seifert.
The one in his efforts to get the Bundesliga back to the start as the football official of the year.
Keller stayed pale these weeks.
His restaurant hotel, the "Black Eagle", has been in the family for generations, is famous beyond the borders. People come from far and wide to dine here in the evenings and to get the best advice from the chef personally when choosing the right wine.
Keller's wines are praised, especially the Pinot Noir, the "diva among wines", as Keller indulges, matured on the Oberbergener Lage, the bass violin, wine connoisseurs know all about it.
Fritz Keller's expertise in wine is undisputed.
When it comes to the ability to lead the German Football Association, he is still on the way.
It's a very sustainable project.
Icon: The mirror