It’s time to conclude my first full season as a supporter of FC Cologne. This won’t take long. I had hoped Cologne would provide an exciting distraction from the relegation battle I expected to consume Watford’s season. Oh, sweet irony! For it was not Watford who struggled – they thrived against the odds and finished in the top half of the table – it was Cologne, whose season got worse, and worse, and worse, until finally… well, here are the numbers:
Played 34, won 8, drawn 6, lost 20, scored 39, conceded 75 (SEVENTY FIVE).
They finished 17th on 30 points and were relegated following their 4-1 mauling at home to Bayern on the final day of the season. They had been clinging to a play off spot – in Germany, the team third from bottom gets to play the team third from top in the second division in a promotion/relegation face off – but Hertha Berlin won their last match to leapfrog Cologne. Hertha will play Dusseldorf, Cologne’s [massively inferior] Rhineland rivals. Shame, that would have been fun.
Fans get a bit hysterical about relegation from the Premier League, and it seems that life is no different in Germany. It’s the epitome of despair, like being cast out of Eden into a really bad horror film, “no one is safe in THE SECOND DIVISION!” Is it that bad? Like in England, the Bundesliga 2 has some famous old clubs from German football history: Dynamo Dresden, Union Berlin, 1860 Munich, Fortuna Dusseldorf (another Rhineland team, the bastards), and the iconic St Pauli.
Why the big fuss from the fans then? Well, as we’ve seen at Blackburn recently, relegation is reflective of a bigger story. And the story at Cologne is bigger than one season – this was their fifth relegation in fifteen years. Or, one relegation every three years. Of course, that means they’ve had a few promotions too, but that kind of wildly unstable form is not healthy for the mind. You can’t blame Cologne fans for going a little bit crazy. Ok, maybe the smoke bombs were a bit much.
