FC Schalke 04 fans surprised the league with a chant. “The number 1 in the pot is us.” That’s how they justify it.
What makes the Ultras Gelsenkirchen (UGE) – the most influential fan club of Bundesliga football club FC Schalke 04 – tick can be experienced at every home match. The Ultras then publish a fan club magazine, the “Blauer Brief”. Circulation: 1500, cost: a donation. It contains match reports from the Ultra point of view, commentaries and news from friendly fan clubs in Germany and abroad. The “Blue Letter” on the home game against Stuttgart (2:1) was particularly exciting. The Ultras commented on the mass brawl that had taken place before the trip to the away game in Berlin.
The Ultras spoke of a “coalition of red and yellow”, by which they probably meant the fans of Borussia Dortmund, Rot-Weiss Essen and 1. FC Köln, with whom the Schalke fans were fighting. According to the Ultras, they had been able to “score a point or two against this coalition in recent weeks”. It was foreseeable that “they would feel compelled to react.”
What happened next was described by the Gelsenkirchen police as follows: “According to investigations so far, at least 100 people, presumably from the Rot-Weiss Essen and Borussia Dortmund fan scene, suddenly arrived in Gelsenkirchen-Schalke at around 6.22 a.m.”. Several hundred members of the organised Schalke fan scene were there. During the mass brawl, baseball bats and other striking tools were used. Four people were seriously injured.
The Ultras sound a little different. A “mob in red and yellow” had struck a “big blow”. For the action of coming to Gelsenkirchen, one must “clearly pay respect”, but there would have been “another important success for blue and white”. They also explain what they mean by this: “Honestly, it took a certain moment to sort yourself out before you stood in the way of the attackers, repelled the assault, and unitedly and clearly chased the visitors back to where they had come from. While one got away with a few bruises oneself, the uninvited guests suffered some casualties and had to leave people behind. “
Because of these incidents, the fans would have already chanted “Die Nummer 1 im Pott sind wir” in Berlin. “That probably needs no further explanation,” write the Ultras. And since they also sang this chant after the Stuttgart victory, it will once again have been about the mass brawl, not about the support of all Schalke fans in the serious crisis.