Dortmund Speaking about something like the ‘best’ fans in Germany

Speaking about something like the ‘best’ is always tricky, given the fact that it is, ultimately, a subjective thing in a lot of instances. You could say the team that wins the league is the ‘best’ because it gained the most points, but even that can be subjective if you look into the likes of how refereeing decisions and injuries had an impact on the season. It is certainly true that looking at something like the ‘best’ fans is not clear cut, with most supporters feeling that they boast such a title.

Even the English side Millwall, whose fans are considered to be violent and offensive, might consider themselves to be the best. So is it true of Borussia Dortmund?

The Yellow Wall

If you want to get a sense of the fervour of Borussia Dortmund fans then you need only cast your eye over the Yellow Wall at the Westfalenstadion. It is such an impressive sight that English sides Tottenham Hotspur and Everton both pointed to it as an inspiration when building their new stadiums. It was described by Uli Hesse, the Germany author, as ‘a massive terrace that seemed like a throwback to football’s golden age’.

With the ability to hold up to 24,454 supporters during a Bundesliga match, it is only slightly smaller than the world-famous Kop at Liverpool’s Anfield ground was during the club’s heyday and dwarfed Celtic’s ‘Jungle’ in the same period.

It was part of the reason why Jürgen Klopp was able to transform the club from an under-achieving sleeping giant to one of the best clubs in the world during the mid-2010s. The manager once described seeing the Yellow Wall as you emerge from the tunnel as an ‘out of body experience’. He said, “You come out and the place explodes – out of the darkness into the light.

You look to your left and it seems like there are 150,000 people up on the terrace all going completely nuts”. Bastian Schweinsteiger, who won the World Cup and countless Bundesliga, said of playing Borussia Dortmund, “It is the Yellow Wall that scares me the most”.

Rejecting Commercialisation

There is something about German football and the manner in which the football clubs still follow the fan club model that means that it has been able to resist the commercialisation of the game. On the one hand, the dominance of Bayern Munich is such that supporters of other clubs might call the Bundesliga a ‘farmer’s league’, yet on the other hand the reality is that German fans have stopped the clubs from pricing them out of the game altogether; something that English fans certainly couldn’t claim.

Borussia Dortmund fans have been at the forefront of that, never more so than in the protests against the club being sponsored by a weapons manufacturer.

The deal was signed in 2024, with Die Borussen ratifying a deal worth more than €20 million with Rheinmetall, headquartered in Dusseldorf and responsible for the creation of guns and bombs. Almost immediately there were demonstrations in front of the club’s offices, with supporters taking to Wembley for the Champions League final against Real Madrid and brandishing a banner that said, “Rheinmetall: using football to clean your image”.

Some even went so far as to say that it cost the team the final, given the manner in which fans were more interested in protesting the deal than cheering the team on.

Fighting the Far Right

If you still wanted a reason to believe in the brilliance of Borussia Dortmund fans and to agree with the claim that they’re the best in Germany, you could look towards the fact that the supporters of the club have been leading the fight against the rise of the far right in the country. You might think that Germans would know better than most how dangerous it can be to listen to populist rhetoric, but the far right rising all around Europe, it is clear that some people are not interested in heeding the warnings of the past.

When racism and anti-Semitism was rampant in German football in the 1980s and early 1990s, Dortmund fans worked with the club to try to eradicate it.

Now there are groups looking to do the same thing. Since 2011, the club has run a project looking to educate supporters about the horror of the Holocaust, given that one of the songs sung at the stadium said that they wanted a tram to run ‘Gelsenkirchen to Auschwitz’, with Gelsenkirchen being the home of the club’s fierce rivals Schalke.

The work of supporters to combat the rise of the far right isn’t unimportant; football fans are just as much of a part of everyday society as anyone else. It is crucial work, given the fact that Dortmund itself is located in the heartland of a part of the country that struggles from a socio-economic point of view