Latest news with #Volksparkstadion
Yahoo
02-07-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
HSV strengthen attack with Philippe signing
Newly-promoted Bundesliga side Hamburger SV have sealed the signing of Rayan Philippe. The 24-year-old attacking player joins the club on a permanent deal from 2. Bundesliga side Eintracht Braunschweig. Advertisement Philippe is coming off an impressive campaign in the second division, scoring 14 goals and providing six assists. HSV board member for sport Stefan Kuntz trusts him to take the next step in the Bundesliga. 'Rayan was a key performer for Braunschweig and played a big role in them staying up last season in particular,' said Kuntz. 'He's an extremely interesting player and we've closely followed his positive development. He's shown his strengths in the second division and we're now pleased that Rayan will take the next step in his career together with HSV as we both move into the Bundesliga and try to establish ourselves there.' Advertisement Philippe, who will wear the No. 14 shirt, is excited about the move. 'I'm really happy about joining HSV and I look forward to getting to know my teammates and the staff. I'm already excited about my first home game here after already experiencing the atmosphere at the Volksparkstadion," he said. "I want to get to work straight away to help the club achieve their goals. HSV have a rich history and are now back in the Bundesliga, which I'm really looking forward to experiencing. I want to show that this team and myself have the quality to survive and do well in this league.'
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Ex-ultra elected new Hamburg president as club labelled 'debt free'
Henrik Koencke, candidate for the president, takes part in the general meeting of Hamburger at Volksparkstadion. Georg Wendt/dpa Former ultra fan Henrik Köncke has been voted as the new president of SV Hamburg, just over a month after their promotion back to the Bundesliga. Köncke, previously one of the club's radical supporters in the stands, received a clear majority of 65.71% to succeed former player Marcell Jansen. Ex-coach Felix Magath was controversially not allowed to stand for election. Advertisement Finance chief Eric Huwer also told Saturday's annual general meeting that the club are "debt-free" as they head back to the German top flight. Hamburg had been in the second tier since relegation in 2018.
New York Times
12-05-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Hamburg revel in the completion of their long road back to the Bundesliga
The man has clearly had quite a night. His eyes are glazed over and his body is swaying with the rhythm of the train as it rattles back into town. He's also carrying a square of grass as if it's the most important thing he will ever hold. He has it in the palm of his hand, with his fingers splayed, like a waiter delivering a Michelin-starred meal to the table. Advertisement The train carriage is full and each time it pulls into a station, the standing passengers stumble a few strides and knock into one another. The man does, too, but he uses his body to protect the grass and fixes a glare at anyone who looks at it for too long. He need not worry. There are at least a dozen other passengers, some younger, some older, one much older, carrying their own squares of grass, each of them having also been cut from the Volksparkstadion pitch. It's Saturday night and after seven years in the wilderness, Hamburg have been promoted back to the Bundesliga. In the hours before, chaos. Needing a win over lowly Ulm to seal their promotion, Hamburg fell behind to a scruffy set-piece goal. They were level quickly, but survived all sorts of chances and a missed penalty thereafter, before taking a lead that they would never lose late in the first half. Ransford-Yeboah Konigsdorffer made it 2-1 with a gorgeous lob from outside the box and the Volkspark shook with relief. Minutes later, Davie Selke — their masked, warrior forward — thundered a header home at the back post and everyone knew then that it would be a night that nobody forgot. By full-time, Hamburg had scored six. Each time, their goal music throbbed and flares burned in the stands. And when the game was over, fans poured onto the pitch from every side of the ground, and the players allowed themselves to be taken by those waves. Strangers held them aloft and kissed their cheeks. Some just held players tight, closed their eyes, and refused to let go. By the end of the night, stories of people being hurt began to emerge. On Sunday morning, the city's fire department revealed that 25 people were hospitalised, with one person having suffered life-threatening injuries. It was a shocking detail because the mood in the stadium had been wild and uninhibited, but without the suggestion of any issues. Advertisement Red and blue flare smoke rose from the pitch, between flags bearing Hamburg's famous rhomboid crest. There were fans on the roofs of the dugouts and bouncing on the crossbars. At the northern end, the capo led choruses of call-and-response from his cage. Robert Glatzel, the centre-forward, found a microphone and led the whole stadium in chanting Mario Vuskovic's name. Vuskovic is serving a four-year ban after testing positive for EPO in 2022, a ruling which he and the club bitterly contest and which the fans have wholeheartedly rejected. Vuskovic goes to almost every home game. He was there on Saturday, too, down on the pitch and in the arms of supporters. From high up in the press box, it looked like one of the biggest parties the city had ever seen. What a contrast to the mood that had descended upon the Volkspark seven years earlier, almost to the day. Hamburg have become a cautionary tale. They were a founder member of the Bundesliga when it began in 1963 and, until 2018, were the only club to have never been relegated from it. A clock in the Volkspark commemorated the length of that stay and ticked on, season after season, until, after 54 years and 261 days, it came to a stop. At the end of the 2017-18 season, Hamburg needed to beat Borussia Monchengladbach at home to have any chance of avoiding relegation. They also needed Wolfsburg to lose. Hamburg were leading 2-1 late in the second half, but with Wolfsburg beating Koln 4-1, there was no hope and the atmosphere in the stadium turned hostile. Flares were thrown from the Nordtribune, where the club's ultras stand, down onto the pitch. The game was delayed as the penalty box was consumed by dark, acrid smoke, and battalions of police officers were deployed to stare down the fans. Hamburg deserved what happened to them. They had become increasingly dysfunctional throughout the decade, but their six German championships and one European Cup (1983) helped preserve their ego despite their tumble down the table and all sorts of anecdotal evidence. In 2008, a young, up-and-coming coach affronted club officials by turning up to an interview in a pair of jeans, and his candidacy was pompously dismissed. Advertisement The coach's name? Jurgen Klopp. In 2015, a backpack belonging to sporting director Peter Knabel was found in a local park. It was full of sensitive club information and, initially, the discoverer phoned the club and tried to hand it in. Whoever they spoke to seemed less than concerned, though, and the good Samaritan's next call was to Bild, Germany's biggest tabloid. On the pitch, they survived relegation play-offs twice. In the second of those, in 2015, only an 89th-minute free kick from Marcelo Diaz kept them out of the 2. Bundesliga. An extra-time goal was enough to overcome Karlsruhe and earn a reprieve. But by 2018, Hamburg were a punchline and the club's longevity brought them little sympathy around the country. They were seen as arrogant. A bit too puffed up with their own history. When Gladbach fans travelled to the Volkspark for that game at the end of the season, they brought a banner with them mocking the stadium's famous clock. Displayed from the away end in the second half, it showed the 30 minutes Hamburg had left in the division. That mirth felt fair because it was assumed Hamburg would bounce straight back. Speak to fans who were there that day and they will tell you that they welcomed relegation as a relief. It was a moment of closure and the point from which a better, healthier club could perhaps start to grow back — and quickly. Instead, the supporters were about to embark on a harrowing journey through 2. Bundesliga life. A ghost train of sporting humiliation. In a division in which the top two earn promotion automatically and the third-placed team plays off against a team from the division above, they finished fourth in their first three seasons. In years four and five, they made the play-offs. The first time, in 2022, they beat Hertha BSC in the Olympiastadion and brought a 1-0 lead back with them to the Volkspark. But they lost the second leg 2-0. Worse, the architect of that defeat was Felix Magath, a club legend who had scored the goal that won them the 1983 European Cup. Advertisement When the final whistle blew that night and the Hertha players celebrated wildly, Magath didn't join them. Instead, he just walked down the tunnel and out of sight. A year later, they headed to Sandhausen on the final day of the regular season, knowing that if they bettered Heidenheim's result, they would be promoted automatically. They won. Meanwhile, Heidenheim were 2-1 down against Regensburg as their game approached stoppage time. But there were 11 extra minutes added in Regensburg. Worse, the stadium announcer in Sandhausen mistakenly believed that the game was over and congratulated the travelling Hamburg fans on their promotion. They flooded onto the pitch in celebration and continued to chant and drink as Heidenheim scored an equalising penalty and began to lay siege to their opponents' goal. There was no phone reception. Nobody knew what was happening. Hamburg club officials desperately tried to get word to the pitch announcer, but it was too late. Tim Kleindienst scored Heidenheim's winner in the 99th minute, clinching promotion, while the television cameras lingered on the Hamburg fans, still relieved that their Bundesliga exile was over. It was a very dark comedy. When news finally filtered through, the promotion party on Sandhausen's pitch became the world's most despondent picnic, all sad faces and sunburn. Hamburg were the laughing stock. Again. They fell back into the relegation play-off and were dismantled 6-1 on aggregate by Stuttgart. The year after, they finished fourth and never even really teased promotion. They were still the butt of the joke, though, as St. Pauli, their city rivals despite having nothing like the same budget or scale, went up as champions. Every year, it seemed to get harder. Many of the players on the pitch on Saturday night have been through all of these experiences. Ludovit Reis, Daniel Heuer Fernandes, Jonas Meffert, Miro Muheim and Glatzel all played in the play-off against Hertha. Jean-Luc Dompe and Konigsdorffer lived through Sandhausen. Advertisement With each crushing low, the mental baggage has accumulated, leaving many of these HSV players fragile and freighted with neuroses. So much so that it was always going to take something unusual to break the cycle. And this season has been unusual. It has been led by the goals of Selke, who has become an unlikely talisman, and by Merlin Polzin, a 34-year-old coach promoted from the bench after the sacking of Steffen Baumgart in November. Polzin was born in Hamburg, he grew up a fan of the club and used to follow the team home and away. In the days before the game against Ulm, a picture of him circulated in the local press, showing him as a teenager, posing with a HSV flag on a long-forgotten away trip. His family still live in the area. His younger brother still plays for the local club that he did, until a bad injury forced him to stop and pursue a career in coaching. Perfect. Of course, this is how such a chastening experience should end. Despite never having had a full-time head-coach role before, Polzin is smart and credentialed. But the irony escapes nobody: HSV have tried everything to get back to the Bundesliga and appointed five different coaches in their seven years away, often at great expense, and in pursuit of some grand vision. A post shared by Seb Stafford-Bloor (@sebstaffordbloor) In the end, it isn't a name or a personality that has led them back, but just a local boy who used to stand with the ultras in the Nordtribune and who, at the time of promotion, had 99 followers on an Instagram account set to private. Polzin's team wobbled towards the end. The closer promotion got, the more frightened Hamburg seemed to become. They suffered dreadful defeats by Eintracht Braunschweig and Karlsruher in recent weeks and somehow failed to beat a Schalke team who played with 10 men for 87 minutes. The past has stalked them. Reminders of promotions not realised have been everywhere. Advertisement But they made it; they got over the line. It took at least an hour for all the players to get off the pitch. When they did and after they were able to barge their way back into the stadium's catacombs, they began their trek to the top of the Volkspark. It's a staircase that starts in the basement, where the dressing rooms are located, and winds all the way up, past VIP lounges, bars and the media facilities. As they climbed, more people followed. Photographers, fans, even Dino Hermann, the club's giant blue dinosaur mascot, followed as they headed for the balcony on the top floor. Wait for it. — Seb Stafford-Bloor (@SebSB) May 10, 2025 There they sang with the fans, drenched Polzin in beer, and stood proudly above a public who have remained loyal through all these chastening, occasionally humiliating years. The long climb back is over at last. Endlich.
The Sun
11-05-2025
- Sport
- The Sun
Shock pics show horror aftermath of Bundesliga pitch invasion that left 25 in hospital and fan fighting for their life
A PITCH invasion that left 25 people in hospital and one fan fighting for their life has left the grass destroyed. Hamburg sealed promotion to the Bundesliga after beating Ulm 6-1. 6 6 6 6 6 6 Fans got carried away after their final home match of the season and thousands descended on to the pitch. Dramatic footage from the Volksparkstadion stadium shows fans jumping from the stands, toppling advertising boards and sprinting across the pitch. Wild scenes erupted as some climbed onto the players, while others raced toward the dugouts and attempted to enter the dressing rooms before being stopped by police. The result from all the footfall is clear to see, with the grass cut up and badly damaged all over the pitch. Clumps of grass were taken out and held by fans, keen to take a souvenir from a memorable match. Several fans were injured when jumping onto the pitch, while some were hurt in scuffles. A total of 25 supporters taken to hospital, where one is recovering from life-threatening injuries. A total of 44 people received on-site medical treatment. Around 65 firefighters and emergency personnel - backed by a dozen ambulances - swarmed the stadium to deal with the fallout. The Hamburg fire department confirmed they initiated a full-scale emergency response at the scene, as scenes of joy turned to panic. Hamburg's victory capped a dramatic end to their seven-year stay in Germany's second division. It comes after Harry Kane got drenched in beer during a live TV interview after winning the Bundesliga with Bayern Munich. The England captain, 31, celebrated on the Allianz Arena pitch with wife Kate and kids Ivy, Vivienne and Louis as he finally got his hands on his first trophy. Bayern clinched the Bundesliga title six days earlier without kicking a ball as Bayer Leverkusen drew with Freiburg.
BBC News
11-05-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
Hamburg pitch invasion hospitalises 25 fans
Twenty-five fans were hospitalised, including one with life-threatening injuries, after a pitch invasion at Hamburg's Volksparkstadion on rushed the field at the full-time whistle as Hamburg secured promotion to the Bundesliga with a 6-1 victory over Ulm, but celebrations were cut short for many who were hurt during the pitch invasion. According to a statement from the Hamburg fire department, a total of 44 people received medical treatment, 19 of those were serious injuries, five were minor and one has been categorised as life-threatening."After the final whistle, football fans stormed the stadium, resulting in injuries to several fans," the statement said."The Hamburg Fire Department launched a major emergency medical response to support the emergency services on site."The statement added that around 65 emergency personnel had to be deployed from both the Hamburg rescue service and fire brigade because of the for Hamburg earned them promotion to the Bundesliga for the first time since suffering relegation in they match or better Cologne's result on the final day next Sunday, they will also be crowned champions.
