German police to cut numbers at Bundesliga matches

German police will reduce their presence at forthcoming Bundesliga matches in a growing row over who should foot the €50 million annual bill for football security.

Three weeks before the Bundesliga kicks off, the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) – home to six clubs including Dortmund and Schalke – has joined a growing chorus of voices demanding a review of policing concepts – and costs – for the German Football League (DFL).

The move by NRW – Germany’s most populous state, home to one in five Germans – follows a similar move by the northern city-state of Bremen last year. Its refusal to finance security prompted the DFB to move a national game against Gibraltar away from Bremen’s Weser stadium last November.

300,000 police hours

According to German statistics, police clocked up about

300,000 hours of service policing football matches, with around a third of these hours involving police deployed in the approaches to stadiums.

Now the NRW government in Düsseldorf is planning to reduce police presence at forthcoming Bundesliga matches for Dortmund, Schalke, Cologne, Leverkusen, Borussia Mönchengladbach and Paderborn. Regular police will no longer be used to accompany fans and riot police will no longer be visible in the stadiums.

“Discussions with fans suggest to me that they are willing to take on more responsibility; now they can prove it,” said Ralf Jäger, interior minister in NRW.

“It’s our goal to create a peaceful football-viewing experience. After we have finished the pilot project we will see whether this has worked.”

He said the police presence would be reduced only at games that had been peaceful in the last three years. More rowdy first- and second-division games will continue to have the same police presence.

Behind the standoff are tight budgets as federal states try to balance their budgets to meet new deficit targets in the coming years.

Bremen, the state with the highest per-capita debt, spent spent €1.4 million last year on football security and has refused to pick up the tab in the coming seasons. In Gelsenkirchen, Schalke was forced to apologise after criticising as heavy-handed the actions of police against its fans during a match against Saloniki.

Reinhard Rauball, president of the DFL, said he was not informed in advance about NRW's plan but said they were "perfectly understandable".

“We’ll see what the results of the pilot project are,” he said, adding that the Düsseldorf government had assured him this move was “not about police being withdrawn from public spaces”.

Germany’s police union (GDP) has reacted cautiously to the Düsseldorf plans.

"If the interior minister presents concepts like [this] I presume he will also accept responsibility for the anticipated scuffles and violence," said GDP chief Arnold Plickert.

Football analysts have criticised the proposals as short- sighted for singling out football clubs to shoulder the cost of its own security.

"When Obama comes for a state visit, does the CIA or the American taxpayer have to pay for his security?" said football analyst Harald Lange. "And what about events held by political parties, or trade fairs?"

German politicians counter that it is the European norm for football associations to help offset the security cost of holding matches. French clubs pay for a portion of police costs on game day while England’s Premier League and Spain’s Primera division pay for police costs outside of the stadium, employing private security firms inside their grounds.

Such a division of labour is problematic in Germany, given tight laws ensuring only police have the power to arrest, detain and use physical force against citizens.