Wir Bauen Eine Neue Stadion?
By: Abby | September 18th, 2008Hertha BSC Berlin plays in one of the world’s landmark stadiums, the Olympic Stadium (Olympiastadion) in Berlin. An impressive monolith of a stadium, brimming with history, the Olympiastadion has hosted scores of major events, including the 2006 Wold Cup, the 1936 Olympics it was built for, and every year’s DFB-Pokal. Renovated in 2004 for the World Cup, it’s a very cool stadium, in a bit of a terrifying Fascist sort of way, and definitely worth visiting if you’re in Berlin whether you’re a football fan or not.
Hertha has played there since 1963, give or take, and our lease extends until 2017. But the Hertha management has been discussing the possibility of building a stadium of our own. While the Olympiastadion is fairly magnificent, it’s certainly not football-specific. Non-footballing events happen there with some regularity, and it’s still got that massive track around it for track and field. And as it’s not ours, we have less control over what goes on with it. And, to be frank, it’s a bit big for Hertha. Borussia Dortmund might be able to pack 80,000 into a stadium on a regular basis, but we had about 13,000 for Tuesday’s UEFA Cup game. While that’s certainly a low attendance figure brought on by a team from Ireland that wasn’t much of a draw, it’s still embarrassing in a stadium of that size. Normal attendance certainly doesn’t get to that 74,000 mark.
The problems in building a new place is that it’ll be expensive and it’ll be hard to find a place in Berlin to build it, especially since it seems that the powers-that-be in Berlin think that the Olympiastadion is perfectly fine, and was renovated recently with involvement of taxpayer money, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t be used. But Hertha seems to definitely have some dreams of a soccer-specific stadium (words that MLS fans are probably familiar with), and it’s unlikely that this week is the last we’ll hear of it.
And in other, less complicated and rather cheerful news, congratulations to Raffael and his wife Jamily, who welcomed their son Raffael Nunez into the world right about when the rest of the team was taking on St. Patrick’s. It’s Raffael’s first child, and I wish him and his wife and newborn son the best for the future.
Category: Team News
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Well they have plenty of time to save their pennies! Maybe they should follow the Union Berlin model and ask for fan support, better still they could share a stadium out in Köpenik with Union. Let’s face it a 30,000 seater that is sold out every game would be far better than what we have now, my only regret is I will never be in Berlin long enough to see it.
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