FC St. Pauli’s Bundesliga season so far has gone roughly as expected. Even before the first game, the neighborhood club had already been assigned its own place in the food chain when the acclaimed promotion coach Fabian Hürzeler accepted an offer from England, which from his point of view was clearly too good to refuse. In the meantime, a controversy arose about alleged anti-Christianity because the club started a cooperation with the punk band Bad Religion and sold merchandise with a crossed out cross, although if you look closely it was just the band’s logo and the uproar was therefore unfounded. St. Pauli has withdrawn from Platform and week after week it feels a little better – in 14th place you are two places above the famous line that marks the relegation zone.
This probably contains the most important insight of all: the current interim sporting results do not come as a surprise, but are an almost inevitable consequence of a club that pursues a coherent overall strategy and is at peace with itself in terms of atmosphere.
:“We feel the financial gap firsthand”
FC St. Pauli wants to keep up with the financially overwhelming competition – and is founding a cooperative. Board member Miriam Wolframm explains how up to 30 million euros are to be raised in this unusual way.
“We are promoted to the Bundesliga and would like to become a Bundesliga team,” said St. Pauli’s sports director Andreas Bornemann recently during a kind of annual review session, and despite the apparent contradiction, that was an absolutely truthful sentence. The club is here to stay, but the acclimatization phase is a process that cannot be completed for several years at the earliest due to the economic imbalance in the league. Until then, they know that at the left-wing neighborhood club, there will be a tough class fight – especially on the green grass, where you want to leave at least two, at best three or more, competitors behind at the end of the season.
The St. Paulians want to grow organically and wait for convincing transfer opportunities
For this purpose, Bornemann and coach Alexander Blessin have put together a collective team, with all the advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that the players are humble and willing to learn and, according to reports, form an unshakable unit that has not been seen in St. Pauli for a long time. Bornemann said at the beginning of January that the team had “not disappointed once” this season, although one or two additional points might have been possible. The disadvantages include that the internal group dynamics require a lot of detailed work. Even if the Paulians could suddenly afford it, they would probably not act in this transfer winter like TSG Hoffenheim, who are currently tied on points and have added some expensive individual talents to their squad, but also presumably vanities. The team should grow organically – and gaps in the squad will only be closed when a really convincing opportunity arises on the market.
This is also why sports director Bornemann decided not to replace playmaker Marcel Hartel, who had moved to the USA after promotion, with a spontaneous transfer in the summer and instead preferred a more in-depth intervention in January: in midfielder James Sands (on loan from New York) and the attackers Noah Weißhaupt (on loan from SC Freiburg) and Abdoulie Ceesay (450,000 euros transfer fee, previously with Estonian club Paide Linnameeskond) Three new players were brought in, all of whom could satisfy previously unmet needs.
The American Sands should bring strategic skill and relieve the pressure on Jackson Irvine and Eric Smith in the center. It is hoped that the former German junior national player Weißhaupt, 23, will take the next step in development in the neighborhood and add his pace to the offensive. And the 20-year-old Gambian Ceesay comes from the niche, but he has a brutal body for his age and could, at best, give striker Johannes Eggestein (two goals this season) a little push from behind. St. Pauli’s coach Blessin wanted a little more squad depth and got it. When play resumes this Saturday against Eintracht Frankfurt (kick-off at 3:30 p.m.), it will now become clear for the first time whether one or two additional goals can be added to the team’s considerable defensive strength.
However, that is not the reason why St. Pauli President Oke Göttlich is expected at the training ground on Kollaustrasse in Hamburg on Friday. Göttlich would like to take this opportunity to remind the players to subscribe to shares in the cooperative that was launched in December, with which fans and patrons can purchase the local Millerntorstadion and provide their heart club with additional economic power. So far, almost 20 million euros have been raised; the hope was for up to 30 million. But you don’t want to let yourself get stressed out: you should move forward step by step – until a Bundesliga promoted team has become a real Bundesliga team.
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