Bundesliga fans give DFB the silent treatment as Dortmund hit seven

It was almost surreal. Signal Iduna Park, that fullest and famously atmospheric of European grounds, was reduced to a murmur on match night. You could repeatedly hear the sound of boot on ball as a crowd of 75,000 sat in near silence, a vigil only broken for a modest cheer as Jacob Bruun Larsen scored to give hosts Borussia Dortmund an early lead against Nürnberg. Dortmund wasn’t alone in the domestic season’s first Englische Woche, with supporters across all the midweek Bundesliga fixtures electing not to chant, sing, drum or support in any audible way during the first 20 minutes of their respective games, in protest at the Deutscher Fußball-Bund’s (DFB) position in the standoff between the governing body and various supporter groups. The fans’ statement, short and to the point, was reprised on banners in enclosures at both ends of the stadiums. “DFB, DFL & Co. Ihr werdet von uns hören, oder auch nicht.” You will hear from us, or not. Talks between the authorities and supporter group representatives broke down in late August, with a coalition of supporters from different clubs releasing a terse statement accusing the DFB of having no real intention to listen, despite promises of meaningful dialogue between the two sides stretching back more than 12 months. “We increasingly got the impression that as in previous decades, they were only using media-friendly words to avoid any actual action,” wrote the supporters collective led by fans from clubs including Hertha and Stuttgart. A joint statement in reply from the DFB and DFL (Deutsche Fußball Liga) dismissed many of the complaints, pointedly levelling the charge that “any exchange (between the two parties) must be objective and fact-based”. Last season’s protests included those at Mainz and Dortmund against Monday night fixtures – the mass throwing of tennis balls on the pitch at the former was reprised just last weekend in Switzerland as Young Boys supporters showed their displeasure with the growing importance given to eSports by clubs, while the latter produced BVB’s lowest home attendance at a Bundesliga match for 20 years against Augsburg. At a time when the Bundesliga is marketing itself extremely effectively on the international stage on the back of its widely enjoyed fan experience in the stadiums (“football as it’s meant to be” is the competition’s strap line), some of the faithful are complaining that the matchday experience for the regulars is becoming worse. The rollout of VAR, and the lack of a flow of information for the spectators inside stadiums while decisions are made, is another widely-held bugbear. The August statement from fans complained that the game was being “torn even further away from its cultural and social roots and gutted on the altar of profit and greed”. One of the other main issues is that of collective punishment, something that many Dortmund fans feel especially strongly about. It was after disturbances surrounding the February 2017 game with RB Leipzig that