No one is quite sure when Europe's largest stand got the name for which it is now famous, although what is certain is that it happened more recently than most people think.
The yellow wall of Borussia Dortmund's Westfalenstadion was described by German author and writer Uli Hesse in 2018 as what Bayern Munich, the most successful and powerful club in that country, did not have: “a huge terrace that seemed like a throwback to football.” ”. Golden age”.
This architectural beast can hold 24,454 spectators for Bundesliga matches, more than double that of Celtic's legendary 'Jungle' in the 1960s, and only slightly less than the maximum capacity of the Kop at Anfield during the same period. a golden era at Liverpool. history.
“Unlike Jungle or Kop, the term Yellow Wall is not very old,” Hesse stressed, taking Kicker, the most popular football magazine in Germany, as a reference for its relevance. Only in May 2009 did the description “Yellow Wall” appear on its pages for the first time and that was due to the reflections of the then Dortmund goalkeeper, Roman Weidenfeller, when he learned that 10,000 fans of the club had traveled to attend a match against Eintracht Frankfurt.
“It's amazing; even when we play away from home, the yellow wall will be there,” Weidenfeller said.
It was another 21 months before Kicker began using the expression regularly, helping it become an established term in global football parlance.
This was around the time Dortmund won the Bundesliga two seasons in a row under Jurgen Klopp, who had transformed underperforming giants into a club competing for domestic as well as European honours.
His team, Dortmund, would lose the Champions League final to Bayern at Wembley in May 2013.
This weekend, the club has the opportunity to win, at the same London venue, the same trophy for the first time since its only victory in the competition in 1997. This time, the rival is Real Madrid and Dortmund, who he finished fifth in the classification. The Bundesliga this season, 27 points behind champion Bayer Leverkusen, is a talented team but not in the same state of health as 11 years ago.
Klopp's charisma and achievements helped Dortmund become the second club with many football fans in all of Europe. However, iconography was also an important feature of Dortmund's appeal.
Their popular former manager, who left Liverpool in May after almost nine years, described the experience of seeing the Yellow Wall emerging from the bowels of the Westfalenstadion as an almost out-of-body experience.
Dortmund fans say goodbye and thank Klopp who left in 2015 (Patrik Stollarz/AFP via Getty Images)
“This dark tunnel is exactly two meters high (just under 6ft 7in), and when you come out it's like being born,” the 6ft 3in Klopp said. “You come out and the place explodes: from darkness to light. “You look to your left and it looks like there are 150,000 people on the terrace, all going completely crazy.”
Weidenfeller was a leader in Klopp's team: “If you are the enemy, it crushes you, but if you have him behind you as a goalkeeper, it is a fantastic feeling.”
This opinion was supported by Bayern midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger, winner of the Champions League and World Cup, who later played for Manchester United and Chicago Fire of the MLS. When asked if he was more worried about the Dortmund players or their coach Klopp, he replied: “What scares me the most is the yellow wall.”
The large scale of the structure offers a variety of viewpoints. “From the front of the lower tier you can almost scratch the goalkeeper's back, while far below the roof, where there is a 37-degree inclined angle, it is like a ski jump,” concluded the German magazine Der. Spiegel.
According to Hesse, Daniel Lorcher, born in 1985, was “more or less responsible” for the creation of the term Yellow Wall. In 2004, as Dortmund faced ruin on and off the field and its financial situation grew bleaker, the club's largest ultras group produced a mosaic that paraphrased an Oscar Wilde aphorism: “Many walk through dark alleys, but only a few look towards the stars.”
Lorcher was a prominent member of The Unity, which was located in the center of what was then known simply as the Sudtribune, just behind the goal. His job was to make as much noise as possible, but Lorcher considered that in Dortmund there were greater possibilities due to the size of the stands. If the ultras could involve other fans, persuading them to dress in bright yellow while holding flags and banners of the same color, say, the effect would be surprising, helping Dortmund's players, as well as potentially creating a more intimidating atmosphere for opponents.
Not only did this require a large amount of fabric, but everything had to be the right shade of yellow.
Lorcher and other ultras contacted a Danish retail chain that had stores throughout Germany. “They sold us more than five kilometers of fabric and we made four thousand flags,” Lorcher told Hesse. “We rented sewing machines for weeks and then had to learn how to use them. “It was hard work, but we had a lot of fun.”
As the 2004-05 season came to a close and Dortmund avoided oblivion, “flags bathed the entire stands in yellow” before a home game against Hansa Rostock, Hesse wrote in his book Building The Yellow Wall.
One of the banners read: “At the end of the dark alley the yellow wall shines,” and another read: “Yellow wall, Dortmund south stand.”
Since 2005, the Westfalenstadion has been known as Signal Iduna Park after the club decided to use a sponsorship deal to reduce a debt, which was eventually paid to the Morgan Stanley bank three years later.
There were many factors that contributed to Dortmund's precarious financial situation during that period and one of them was the demand for stadiums to become all-seater venues, following the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in England.
In the summer of 1992, the North Stand of the Westfalenstadion was converted into a seating area, reducing the total capacity from 54,000 to less than 43,000. Club officials realized they could charge more money for a comfortable experience, but there was a reluctance to subject the southern Sudtribune (as the old Dortmunders still call it) to the same treatment after conversations with fans, who made them realize He realized that the terrace was the club's only real marketing tool.
After Dortmund beat Juventus 3-1 in Munich to win the Champions League title in May 1997, the south stand was doubled in size. As the stadium became bigger and safer, Dortmund spent more money than ever on players. But there was no further success and, by 2005, there was a real chance the club would close.
Today, Dortmund's stadium is the largest in Germany, while its average attendance in the Bundesliga is higher than that of any other Bundesliga club, including Bayern: this season, Dortmund averaged more than 81,000 and the Bayern, in its futuristic Allianz Arena, was 75,000. Between Dortmund and the third and fourth teams (Eintracht Frankfurt and Stuttgart), the drop was almost 26,000 spectators, a figure barely greater than the capacity of the Yellow Wall, a terrace that could accommodate a population of reasonable size. city.
The Yellow Wall greets Marco Reus in his last home game this month (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)
Although the stadium capacity is reduced to convert it into a seated grandstand for European nights, the three clubs with the lowest average attendance in the Bundesliga (Union Berlin, Darmstadt and Heidenheim) could gather their entire crowd in Sudtribune with space ample; However, the club has not really sought to capitalize on it financially directly.
Hesse even suggests that the Yellow Wall “harms” Dortmund in this regard, because ticket prices have been kept very low.
On average, season ticket holders pay 14 euros (£11.90/$15.10) per game, but if Dortmund put seats there and charged more, the club, according to Hesse, would lose its soul.
The fact that, according to financial experts at Forbes and Deloitte, Dortmund is not even among the 20 best clubs in Europe in terms of matchday revenue (when it has one of the largest stadiums on the continent) is a reflection of the attitude that exists in its region, the industrial heart of Germany. Instead, there is a residual monetary benefit from the Yellow Wall, with companies such as chemical company Evonik, brewer Brinkhoff's and pump maker Wilo eager to associate themselves with a creation that is authentic to a working-class region of the country.
The Westfalenstadion has become a tourist destination, but the Yellow Wall will not be affected for the time being.
The most important decision for visitors, says Hesse, is to join the party on the terrace or watch its glow from afar.
(Top photo: Alex Gottschalk/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
