Around 1000 fans accompanied Rot-Weiss Essen to the last away game to Bayreuth. The RWE fans received praise from all sides. However, not all fans behaved in an exemplary manner.

A good 1000 fans of Rot-Weiss Essen took on the last away trip of over 500 kilometres to Bayreuth. After all, it was also the first away trip after more than ten years outside the gates of North Rhine-Westphalia.

In the stadium, the RWE supporters provided an excellent atmosphere for the 90 minutes. Newcomer Clemens Fandrich was impressed and said that the Essen fans were simply “world class”.

After the match, a group of travellers even turned out to be lifesavers. As reported by the “Bayerischer Rundfunk” (BR), football fans from Essen helped a man in an accident on the A70 near Thurnau on Saturday afternoon.

The entire Rot-Weiss Essen club condemns this cowardly attack in the strongest possible terms – including all team members of our first team, who were at the rest area with the team bus at the same time and involuntarily witnessed the incident.

Rot-Weiss Essen

But not all Rot-Weiss fans ended the Bayreuth trip with the rating “exemplary”. There is also the dark side of the Essen supporters. As the third division club has now announced in an official club statement, there were violent confrontations among their own (!) fans around the Bergeborbeck team’s away game in Franconia.

The RWE statement in wording:

“Last Saturday, around the 3rd league match at Spvgg Bayreuth, there were clashes between individual RWE fan groups. These culminated in an attack on the passengers of a fan bus during the return journey at a motorway service station. Several RWE fans were injured.

We are currently in the process of coming to terms with the incident and obtaining a more in-depth overview so that we can then jointly discuss how to deal with it further, including the appropriate consequences and possible sanctions. We will not comment further on this incident before then.

However, we would like to emphasise in no uncertain terms that the entire Rot-Weiss Essen club condemns this cowardly attack in the strongest possible terms – including all members of our first team, who were at the rest area with the team bus at the same time and involuntarily witnessed the incident.

Such behaviour is in no way compatible with RWE’s values and is therefore unacceptable. We wish the victims of this act a speedy and complete recovery. “