Watching Soccer Is Not Just Being A Spectator

For many German men, including myself, playing soccer is a popular pastime. I consider myself very lucky to have been able to turn my hobby into a profession. I´ve never cut a fine figure on the pitch, however. Instead, I write about what´s happening on the field, especially about “my” team, Wacker Burghausen, a German third division club, whose home field is close to the Austrian border, approximately 60 kilometers northwest of Salzburg.


Since I was 12 years old, I´ve watched most of their home matches. For the last three seasons, my job at the local newspaper “Passauer Neue Presse” has made it possible for me to work with my favorite team. Is there anything better for a real fan than having a personal relationship with the players, the sports director and the manager, and having them tell you more than they´re officially allowed to? Everybody is curious. So what´s wrong with knowing a few secrets before everybody else does? The only drawback is that I´m not allowed to tell anyone else, so I can´t use this stuff in my articles. At least it satisfies my thirst for knowledge, though.

One of the first things I learned when I was writing my first soccer story was that you can either just loosely follow a game or watch it with the greatest attention. There is a big difference between those two things. You could compare it to golf: everybody who has never tried it before, thinks it´s not a sport – it´s just a lot of standing around and hitting a little white ball with a golf club. I know it from experience: it´s anything but easy! And this also applies to reporting about a soccer match. Each and every second of the game, you have to know who gave the cross, who caused the corner kick or who passed the ball over to the scorer. In a small stadium like the Wacker-Arena, you don´t have the chance to watch a replay. Especially if you have to write the article right after the match without having the opportunity to see controversial scenes again, the pressure is on you even more since you want to depict the scoring correctly. This is not a question of perfectionism, but of doing your job properly. You get used to it, but at the beginning of my “career”, it would have been nearly impossible if my colleague hadn´t helped me watch the match correctly.

The most difficult situation I´ve had to face so far was just a couple of weeks ago. I was working for six different newspapers or agencies, among them “Kicker”, the most popular soccer magazine in Germany, and two newspapers from Potsdam, our opponent this evenig: the "Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten" and the "Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung". At least I didn´t have to write the red-hot story for my actual employer this evening. That was my colleague´s job. But since he had to finish the article while watching the match – our boss told him to publish it online right after the final whistle – he couldn´t take over any of my jobs.

The "Wacker-Arena", home field of the German third division club Wacker Burghausen.

The match itself was pretty boring and we lost 1:2. Probably, the only two people who benefited from this were my colleague and me, since less action on the pitch meant less work for us: I had to call all my match-day employers right after a goal, a booking or a substitution. So three goals plus four bookings plus six substitutions plus the kickoff, the half-time whistle and the final whistle times four (two employers didn´t need live information) makes 64 phone calls altogether. Considering the fact that I actually had to keep an eye on what´s going on on the pitch as well, this was quite a big number.

The most critical phase was right after the final whistle, when I had to call all my employers – at the same time - to tell them that the match was over. However, while doing this, I was also supposed to interview some of the players to have statements to make the story livelier. We´ve all heard that women are master multitaskers. They could probably call four people while they are talking to someone else, but unfortunately I can´t. In the end, I had only spoken with two players and had to ask this cocky guy from the local radio station if he could help me out this one time. He did, but only after he had made some stupid comments, asking if I had been too busy to do my job. Bla bla bla. If he only knew that his idle talk goes in one ear and out the other ... But he would have probably still said it, because he really enjoys listening to himself talk.

In the end, though, everything worked pretty well and I was able to deliver all the information on time. The only thing was that I had to get up very early the next morning to finish two articles before university. Still, the fee I earned is loads of money for me, even if I had to beat the early bird to catch the worm before it did. But as a reward, the worm was much fatter than usual.