England and Germany football rivalry
The
England and
Germany national
football teams share a major rivalry, with matches between the two nations often attracting much media attention, public interest and comment in both countries but especially in England. Although the footballing rivalry began in earnest after the
1966 World Cup, it was fed by non-footballing events that had taken place between the two countries in previous decades, particularly memories of the
Second World War. This has given the rivalry a highly competitive and sometimes unpleasant edge, particularly in English media coverage, although players on both sides have usually attempted to downplay such negative associations. Germany is regarded in England as one of the main rivals of the national football team, along with such nations as
Scotland and
Argentina. Unlike England's rivalries with those other two teams, however, the emnity is felt predominantly on the English side rather than on the side of the opposition, with the German team's
traditional rivalry with the Netherlands being seen as more important in Germany.
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The Football Association representative touring party of 1899 |
England and Germany share an international football history dating back to the end of the
19th century.
The Football Association instigated a four game tour of
Germany and
Austria by a representative England team in November of 1899. The England team played a representative German team in
Berlin on
23 November 1899. The German side lost 13-2. Two days later a slightly altered German side lost 10-2. The third and fourth matches were played in
Prague and
Karlsruhe against a combined Austrian and German side and were won by England 8-0 and 7-0 respectively.
In 1901 a team representing Germany toured England and lost 12-0 to the
England amateur team captained by
G.O. Smith at
Tottenham Hotspur's
White Hart Lane on
21 September 1901.
On the 25th they played England's professionals at Hyde Park in Manchester where they lost 10-0.
The first ever full international between the two teams was a
friendly match played on Saturday
May 10 1930, in
Berlin. England were 1-0 and 2-1 up in the game, but after losing a player to injury went behind 3-2 before a late goal from
David Jack brought the scores to 3-3, which was how the game finished.
The next match between the two teams was played on
December 4 1935, at
White Hart Lane in
London, the first full international to take place between the teams in England and the first since the rise to power of
Hitler and the
Nazis in 1933. It was also the first match to stir up particular controversy, as
The Observer newspaper reported protests by the English
Trade Union Congress that the game could be used as a propaganda event by the Nazi regime. "No recent sporting event has been treated with such high seriousness in Germany as this match... Between 7,500 and 8,000 Germans will travel via Dover, and special trains will bring them to London. A description will be broadcast throughout Germany... Sir Walter Citrine, secretary of the General Council of the T.U.C., in a further letter to Sir John Simon, said that 'such a large and carefully organised Nazi contingent coming to London might confirm the impression among people in this country that the event is being regarded as of some political importance by the visitors'."
Of the match itself, however, which England won 3-0, the same newspaper reported the following week that: "So chivalrous in heart and so fair in tackling were the English and German teams who played at Tottenham in mid-week that even the oldest of veterans failed to recall an international engagement played with such good manners by everybody."
The next game between the two teams, and the last to be played before
World War II, was again in Germany, a friendly at the
Olympic Stadium in Berlin on
May 14 1938, played in front of a crowd of 110,000 people. It was the last occasion on which England played against a unified German team until the
1990s. This was the most controversial of all the early encounters between the two teams, as before kick-off the English players were ordered by the
Foreign Office to line up and perform a
Nazi salute in respect to their hosts. How compliant the players were with this situation has been a matter of debate, with a feature in
The Observer in 2001 speculating that they were "perhaps merely indifferent players (who had undoubtedly become more reluctant, to the point of mutiny, by the time the post-war memoirs were published)."
A
BBC News Online report published in 2003 reported that the salute was calculated to show: "that Germany, which two months earlier had annexed Austria, was not a pariah state. The friendly game effectively helped clear the way for Chamberlain's "Peace in our Time" deal with Hitler, which, in turn, led to Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia."
England won the match 6-3, but according to German writer
Ulrich Linder, author of the book
Strikers for Hitler, "To lose to England at the time was nothing unusual because basically everybody lost to [them] at the time. For Hitler the propaganda effect of that game was more important than anything else."
The two countries did not meet again on a football pitch for sixteen years, until a friendly at
Wembley Stadium on
December 1 1954, which England won 3-1 against an under-strength West German side, who were at the time the champions of the world, having won the
1954 FIFA World Cup. England's rivalry from this point on was always with the
West Germany national football team — although they did play some matches against the
East Germany national football team, the rivalry never developed the same edge or high profile.
England won further friendlies against West Germany in 1956 (3-1 at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin) and 1965 (1-0 in
Nuremberg). Finally, the teams met at Wembley again on
February 23 1966, as part of their preparations for the
1966 FIFA World Cup, which was to be held in England. England again won 1-0, with a goal from
Nobby Stiles, and the match also saw the first appearance for England of
West Ham United striker
Geoff Hurst.
Both countries had a successful World Cup in 1966, and met in the final played at Wembley on Saturday
July 30 1966. This was and still is the most important match ever played between the two teams, and it was also the first time they had ever met in a competitive game as opposed to the friendly matches they had played before. It was also a highly eventful and in some respects controversial game, which created the modern rivalry between the teams.
England led 2-1 until the very end of the game, when a German goal levelled the scores and took the match into
extra time. In the first period of extra time, England striker Geoff Hurst had a shot on goal which bounced down from the
crossbar and then out of the goal, before being cleared away by the German defenders. The England players celebrated a goal, but the referee was unsure as to whether or not the ball had crossed the line when it hit the ground. After consulting with his
linesman,
Tofik Bakhramov, the referee awarded a goal to England. Bakhramov, from the
USSR, became famous and celebrated in English
popular culture as "the Russian linesman", although he was actually from
Azerbaijan. When England played the
Azerbaijan national team in a World Cup qualifier in October 2004 — in a stadium named after Bakhramov — many England fans travelling to the game asked to be shown the grave of the official, who had died in 1996, so that they could place flowers on it, and before the game a ceremony honouring him was attended by Hurst and other footballing celebrities.
The Germans, however, did not believe that the ball had crossed the line, with commentators such as Robert Becker of
Kicker magazine accusing the linesman of bias because the German team eliminated the USSR in the semi-final
. Many studies using film analysis and computer simulation have taken place in subsequent decades in an attempt to finally prove one way or another whether the goal was valid. In Germany it led to the creation of the expression "
Wembley-Tor", or "Wembley-Goal", a phrase used to describe a goal which is awarded even though the ball did not cross the line.
England, however, scored another controversial goal at the end of extra time, winning 4-2. This goal came after fans began to spill onto the field, thinking the game was over, which should have stopped play. The goal, a third for Hurst making him the only man ever to score a
hat-trick in a World Cup final, was described by
BBC Television commentator
Kenneth Wolstenholme in a now-famous piece of commentary, "
They think it's all over... it is now!", referring to the English fans who had spilled onto the field. This has also become a famous and celebrated part of English popular culture, indellibly linked with the game in the minds of the English public.
The game is often held as having been the height of English sporting achievement, but it also created some less favourable legacies. "The schizophrenic combination of fatalistic pessimism and unbridled, jingoistic optimism which surrounds the fixture is more than a product of footballing history. 'Two World Wars and one World Cup,' is how England's crueller fans might sum it up."
Two years after the World Cup, on
June 1 1968, the two teams met again in another friendly match, this time in Germany, in which the Germans won their first victory over an English team, thirty-eight years after they had first played. The scoreline was 1-0,
Franz Beckenbauer scoring for Germany, but as
Hugh McIlvanney wrote in his match report for
The Observer: "Comparing this miserable hour and a half (in which fouls far outnumbered examples of creative football) with the last great meeting between the countries is entirely fatuous. But that will not prevent the Germans from doing it. Their celebrations will not be inhibited by the knowledge that today's losers were almost a reserve team, and even the agonies of boredom they shared with us will now seem worthwhile. They have beaten England, and that is enough."
Far more noted and remembered, however, was the next competitive meeting between the two teams, in the quarter-finals of the
1970 FIFA World Cup in
Mexico. England were 2-0 up in the game, but the Germans managed the draw the scores level at 2-2 in the second half, and then scored another in extra time to win 3-2. England had been weakened by losing their goalkeeper
Gordon Banks to illness, and also substituted
Bobby Charlton, one of their leading players, while the Germans were in the midst of their comeback. As McIlvanney put it when reflecting on the loss five days later, "Sir Alf Ramsey's team are out because the best goalkeeper most people have ever seen turned sick, and one who is only slightly less gifted was overwhelmed by the suddenness of his promotion. In sport disaster often feeds upon itself but this was a sickeningly gluttonous example."
The result was psychologically damaging for English morale — as
The Guardian newspaper described in a 2006 feature: "Four days later
Harold Wilson blamed
Labour's loss in the general election on the defeat. This marked the start of two decades of German footballing dominance and England's decline."
Two years later the teams met once more, this time in the quarter-finals of the
European Championship, which were at the time held on a home-and-away basis. England lost 3-1 at Wembley on
April 29 1972 in the home leg, and on
May 13 could only draw 0-0 in Germany, being knocked out of the competition. Said
The Observer in 2001, "England may have been robbed of the chance in Mexico.. but there were no shortage of excuses - the heat, the hostile crowd, the food which had felled Banks, the errors of Bonnetti... It was a conspiracy of fate more than a footballing defeat. In 1972, there were no excuses at all. Germany did not just knock England out of the European Championships, they came to Wembley and comprehensively outclassed England."
McIlvanney wrote in his match report for
The Observer: "No Englishman can ever again warm himself with the old assumption that, on the football field if nowhere else, the Germans are an inferior race."
There were several friendly games played, with wins for both nations, in the 1970s and 1980s, but the next competitive match — a second round group game at the
1982 FIFA World Cup — ended in a disappointing 0-0 draw. However, when the teams next met competitively, at the
1990 FIFA World Cup, it was a rather more dramatic and eventful clash in the semi-finals, the first time England had reached that far in the competition since their win in 1966. The England team had started the event poorly and had not been expected to reach that stage of the competition, but in the game were able to match the stronger German team, drawing 1-1 after extra time. The result was thus decided by a
penalty shoot-out — the England team's first — which Germany won 4-3 after misses from
Stuart Pearce and
Chris Waddle. Germany went on to beat
Argentina in the final.
The match stayed heavily in the English popular consciousness not simply for the football and the dramatic manner of the defeat, but also for the reaction of star player
Paul Gascoigne to receiving a
yellow card. His second of the tournament, his realisation that this would see him suspended for the final should England make it prompted him to burst into tears on the pitch. Said
The Observer in 2004, "There are half a dozen images that define this decade of change, which help to show why football widened its appeal. First, and most important, is the sight of Paul Gascoigne crying into his England shirt after being booked in the 1990 World Cup semi-final against West Germany. Unaggressive and emotional, a billboard image that helped to start an apparently unstoppable surge in popularity for the national team."
Despite this rehabilitation of the image of football aided by the English national team's success in the 1990 tournament, the close nature of the defeat to Germany helped to increase the antipathy felt towards the German team and the German nation in general. Mark Perryman wrote in 2006: "How could we expect to beat mighty (West) Germany, who had only narrowly lost the final four years previously? To my mind it is the fact that we so nearly did, then lost in the penalty shoot-out that explains the past 16 years of an increasingly bitter rivalry."
This match was also the last time that England played a West German team, as subsequent matches were all against the reunified German nation as a whole, although this made little difference to the tone and emotion of the rivalry.
England's first match against the unified Germany since 1938 was a friendly in 1991 at Wembley, which the Germans won 1-0. Five years later, at the
1996 European Championships, England played a unified German team for the very first time in a competitive fixture, when they met in the semi-finals. As with the 1966 World Cup, the tournament was being held in England, and the semi-final was played at Wembley Stadium. England's fans and the team were confident, particularly after a 4-1 win over the Netherlands in the group stage and their first ever penalty shoot-out victory, over
Spain, in the quarter-finals.
The build-up to the game was soured, however, by headlines in English
tabloid newspapers which were regarded by many as overly nationalistic, and even
racist in tone, as they had been as well against Spain before the previous match. Particularly controversial was the
Daily Mirror's headline "Achtung! Surrender! For You Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over", accompanied by a mock article aping a report of the declaration of war between the two nations in 1939. The editor of the paper,
Piers Morgan, subsequently apologised for the headline, particularly as it was at least partially blamed for violence following England's defeat, including a riot in
Trafalgar Square.
England had taken the lead in the game in only the third minute, through tournament top scorer
Alan Shearer, but in the sixteenth minute
Stefan Kuntz equalised, and despite many close shots and a disallowed goal from the Germans, the score remained level at 1-1 until the end of extra time. The match was settled by another penalty shoot-out, as in 1990, and although this time all five England penalty-takers were successful, so were all five German players. The shoot-out carried on to "sudden death" kicks, with
Gareth Southgate missing for England and
Andreas Möller scoring for Germany to put the hosts out. Germany, as in 1990, went on to win the tournament.
England and Germany were drawn to meet each other in the first round group stage of the
2000 European Championship, held jointly by
Belgium and the
Netherlands, with the England–Germany game taking place in
Charleroi in Belgium. Before the game, held on
June 17 2000, there was trouble with incidents of violence with England fans in the town centre, although these were mostly brief and did not involve confrontations with German fans. Nonetheless, reporting of the violence did to a degree overshadow the match result in some media coverage.
The match itself was a scrappy affair that lacked the drama of many of the previous encounters, with England sneaking a 1-0 win thanks to a second-half header by striker Alan Shearer. There was enthusiastic celebration of this result in England, particularly as this it was the first time that England had won a competitive match against Germany since the 1966 World Cup final. The German reaction was more pessimistic. Rounding up the German media coverage,
The Guardian reported: "'0-1! Germany weeps. Is it all over?' asked the mass circulation
Bild newspaper in a front-page banner headline. 'Shearer tells us to pack our bags,' wrote Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel."
In the event, both England and Germany lost their final group matches and both were knocked out in the first round, finishing third and fourth respectively in their group.
Before the 2000 European Championship, England and Germany had already been drawn together in the same qualifying group for the
2002 FIFA World Cup. England's home match against Germany was played on Saturday
October 7 2000, and was particularly significant as it was to be the last international fixture ever to be played at the old Wembley Stadium, before it was demolished and rebuilt. However, England did not get the result they would have wanted, and lost 1-0 to a German
free kick scored by
Dietmar Hamann. "It was the last refuge of the inadequate. Half-time neared, England were a goal down and a sizeable section of the crowd sullied the ever-dampening occasion. 'Stand up if you won the War,' they sang," wrote journalist
Ian Ridley in his match report for
The Observer.
The result prompted the resignation of England manager
Kevin Keegan, and by the time
the return match was played at the
Olympic Stadium in
Munich on
September 1 2001, England were now managed by their first ever foreign coach,
Sven-Göran Eriksson. Expectations on the English side were low, but they surprisingly won the game 5-1 with a hat-trick from striker
Michael Owen, and eventually qualified for the World Cup as the winners of their group.
Many Germans were shocked by the size of the defeat, with former striker
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge stating that "I have never seen such a terrible defeat... This is a new
Waterloo for us."
The English press, by contrast, was ecstatic, although once again the tabloid newspapers drew unfortunate comparisons with the Second World War, perhaps showing that the conflict still loomed large in the public consciousness of the nation. Reported the BBC: "'Blitzed' screams the front of the
Sunday Mirror, while the
News of the World picks up on a similar and familiar theme with the headline 'Don't mention the score'."
Ironically, at the World Cup finals in Japan and South Korea, it was Germany who enjoyed more success, finishing second. England were only able to reach the quarter-finals. Both teams were knocked out by the competition winners, Brazil.
As well as the rivalry between the national sides, English and German club teams have also met on numerous occasions in the various European club competitions. Perhaps the most noteworthy encounter was the
1999 UEFA Champions League Final between
Manchester United and
Bayern Munich, which the English club were losing 1-0 until scoring two goals in injury time to win 2-1. This result was celebrated by many in England who were not United fans as being another English victory over Germany.
Happily, the rivalry between the two nations have not prevented their respective nationals from playing in each other's domestic leagues, in certain cases to high renown. Many German players have played in England, including
Bert Trautmann (who played for
Manchester City),
Jürgen Klinsmann (
Tottenham),
Christian Ziege (
Liverpool and
Middlesbrough),
Karlheinz Riedle (Liverpool),
Dietmar Hamann (
Newcastle United, Liverpool and
Manchester City),
Markus Babbel (Liverpool),
Robert Huth (
Chelsea),
Thomas Hitzlsperger (
Aston Villa),
Jens Lehmann (
Arsenal), and
Moritz Volz (Arsenal and
Fulham). They will be joined in the 2006-2007 season by current Germany captain
Michael Ballack, who will play for Chelsea.
Klinsmann was voted Footballer of the Year in 1995 while playing for Spurs, where he pioneered the 'diving' goal celebration.
Far less Englishmen have played in Germany, the most famous being
Kevin Keegan (
Hamburger SV) and
Tony Woodcock (
1.FC Koln and
Fortuna Koln).
Owen Hargreaves, currently a member of the English national side, plays in the
Bundesliga for
Bayern Munich. However, Hargreaves was born in Canada and has never played club football in England.
Keegan was twice
European Footballer of the Year and a
European Cup finalist during his time at Hamburg, where the German public nicknamed him
Mighty Mouse, after a cartoon hero, because of his prolific scoring, his height (or lack thereof), his high level of mobility, and his ability to turn sharply and often while running at high speed, in a manner resembling the 'scampering' of a mouse. Woodcock was also a popular figure at Cologne.
*
Argentina and England football rivalry*
England v Germany: The results in full.
