“Student outfit,” “Breisgau Brazilians,” “Finke’s colourful birds” — these are just some of the well-known nicknames attached to SC Freiburg in the Volker Finke era. The Breisgau side, with players such as Uwe Spies and Andreas Zeyer enrolled at university, were already regarded as “the slightly different club” even before kick-off in their very first Bundesliga match on August 7, 1993 away at Bayern Munich, a 3–1 defeat. The crowd in the university city in Germany’s far south-west was different too.
Students, Greens, intellectuals, winegrowers, workers and, something still new in the early 1990s, many women made the pilgrimage to the idyllic Schwarzwaldstadion by the Dreisam. At times “the beautiful game” mattered more to them than three points. The grim intensity felt elsewhere was never quite as pronounced here. “In Freiburg,” the cabaret artist Matthias Deutschmann, who returned to his native region from Berlin in 1991, said in a 2014 SWR documentary, “football is not a substitute religion as it is at Schalke, but at most a weekend worldview; we do not have these brutal edges you find in Berlin, Gelsenkirchen or Dortmund.” A different sort of football, a left-wing football, for the Bundesliga?
In any case the “Breisgau Brazilians” were innovators. With the short-passing game cultivated by coach Volker Finke, they were ahead of their time. “We were the first to do it like that in Germany,” Finke later admitted, “and I remember an interview with a Bayern Munich player after a match against us saying he always felt as if they had one man more on the pitch.” The fact that players came to training by bicycle or that the team travelled to away games by ICE rather than plane went down especially well with the media, intellectuals and the broader left-leaning milieu.
