{"id":1412,"date":"2016-05-26T01:29:50","date_gmt":"2016-05-26T08:29:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.evergreen.edu\/daykev10\/?p=249"},"modified":"2016-05-26T01:29:50","modified_gmt":"2016-05-26T08:29:50","slug":"borussia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/borussia\/","title":{"rendered":"Borussia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aside from being quite the artist, Emil was able to shed some light on the history of football in northern Deutschland. Many years ago, at the turn of the previous century, coal had been discovered in this part of the country. When it was, Germany had recruited thousands of workers from Eastern Europe to move their and dig for it. These were people from Polish and Slavic backgrounds, in what was at that time Eastern Prussia. With them they brought their cultures as well as the label of Borussia, which is German for Prussia. At the same time as all of this was happening, football, as a sport had begun to emerge as the popular pastime as we know it today.<\/p>\n

As coal miners, these Borussian men were the definition of proletariat or working class. After they finished their hard physical labor, they would play football as a way to unwind. The owners of the mines, the aristocrats, saw them and their football as a low game and would have no part in it, the workers relished this. Eventually clubs were formed in this region, two of which became more prominent than the others, and still exist to this day in the highest class of German football. These clubs were Borussia Dortmund and Borussia M\u00fcnchengladbach. Although the times have certainly changed over the years, the division between worker and owner is still ever present. Today football has become a billion dollar industry, where the big wigs and the top cats have all the money and control the enterprise. Players are able to be paid large sums of money, only when they are able to bend to the will of these owners and do as they say, no matter their performance on the field.<\/p>\n

Emil and I had an interesting discussion after he told me this, and it was primarily surrounding a theory of mine. Coal mining is hard, physical labor, and doing so makes a man much stronger and thus would make him a potentially better footballer. I told him about how, in the first decades of the invention of football, the sport was primarily dominated by strength. Tactics were not so fully developed yet and it was not until the 30’s when the influence of tango in Uruguay made players more skillful with the ball and thus feigns and moves became more prominent. No, before all this, the game was primitive, run faster and be stronger. These coal miners were bred to be good ball players, and it shows now all these years later in how they had managed to become so prominent in the rise of football that, these two clubs specifically, are held in such high prestige to this day.<\/p>\n

Later Emil brought me to the home stadium of M\u00fcnchengladbach. They essentially had a whole autobahn exit dedicated to their stadium. Emil said that when there were games, the whole place was packed and that many people would be outside the stadium who couldn’t even get in.<\/p>\n

\"Borussia\"\u00a0\"Borussia\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aside from being quite the artist, Emil was able to shed some light on the history of football in northern Deutschland. Many years ago, at the turn of the previous century, coal had been discovered in this part of the country. When it was, Germany had recruited thousands of workers from Eastern Europe to move […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3223,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[38,5,6],"tags":[],"geo":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3223"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1412\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}