STANDING AMID THE HUNDREDS of football fans layered along platform 16 at Dortmund’s main station, an England fan gurgles a half-formed cry of helpless frustration. “Your trains are shit but we can’t mention the war.”
It probably made more sense in his head, but this is the matchday transport experience in Germany: an exasperation so teeth-grindingly irritating that it’s difficult to articulate.
Fans crowd a train platform. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
Given hotel prices in Dortmund have increased tenfold for the occasion of the second semi-final, this England fan is like thousands of others in needing to get back to hotels in neighbouring towns.
I’m in the same situation, and need to get to Essen, which is 40km away. We are waiting for a 12.45am train that the platform screen tells us has been delayed to 1.08am. The clock ticks slowly, slowly. A few England fans are arrayed in various states of distress on the ground, but most are giddily watching footage of Ollie Watkins’ preposterous late winner.
A group of Dutch fans are singing songs supporting Spain, that “football is staying in Europe”. An Irish accent slips out from the crowd, reminding a group of Dutch fans about their 2002 World Cup campaign. He shows them a video of Jason McAteer’s goal, and is then quickly talking of how we’d have made the semi-finals of the World Cup if Roy hadn’t been sent home. Because trust me, lads, he was sent home, he didn’t walk.
There’s a packed train sitting at the platform opposite us, on which some of my Irish colleagues are squashed. It has been sitting still for two hours. 1.08am comes and goes. It’s 1.30am and our train has still not arrived. Sighs among the fans turn to a staccato collection of despairing shouts. At around 1.45am, the train simply disappears from the screen. There is no train. Perhaps there never was.
I rush down the steps to the main station amid this mass sweep of angry supporters, and there is now only one word in my universe. Essen. Essen. Essen. I have to get to Essen. I run from platform to platform, looking for any which are displaying the word Essen. I find one on platform 21, and sprint up the steps. The train is stopped but packed with people and with its doors locked. There is no way onboard.
This is like Super Mario: a game of desperate platform-hopping, but rather than collecting mushrooms and coins, I am hunting for the word Essen.
Police block the steps of many of the platforms, saying they are already too packed, turning around beaten-down supporters by telling them to find another train. “There are no fackin’ trains,” spits a furious England fan.
Platform 26 is another promising Essen, and I take the steps three at a time. A train! The button on its doors is flashing green, so I push it and am met with a bunch of roaring Dutch fans telling me there’s no room.
Getting out of Dortmund is a Darwinian event, though, so I push on anyway. A couple of fans shove me back out, only for some heroic Dutch fan to then grab my collar and pull me in. The train is seemingly only for Dutch fans, but my accreditation lanyard has marked me as Not English, which was good enough for my saviour.
The doors close behind me and then immediately open as a couple of English fans try to shove on. They are pushed back onto the platform, and when one tries to push back on again, one Dutch fan grazes him on the side of the head with a flailing punch. The doors close before the situation escalates any further, though the England fans beat on the window and roar with a demoralised fury with which I can relate.
This thump-thump-thump continues as we stand still for another 10 minutes, at which point the driver comes over the intercom to say there are too many passengers on board. “We cannot move until some passengers get off and take another train,” says the disembodied voice of remote, dispassionate evil. Pal, there are no other trains.
I try to hide myself among Dutch fans as I know I will be the first for slaughter if things turn a bit Lord of the Flies. There is no signal, but I stare with ludicrous intensity at my phone, knowing the moment I make eye contact with someone is the moment I am gone.
Minutes that feel like years pass and nobody has moved, when eventually a group of Dutch supporters decide to fall on their sword. They wade through bodies to the doors, and find them locked.
One of them sinks his hands in between the doors and tries to prise them open. Thwarted, he then begins to lace the glass doors with kicks. I feel like telling him that if he breaks the doors then none of us are getting out of Dortmund tonight. But then, just before the doors buckle and smash, we are endowed with our miracle. First a jerk, then a chug, and all of a sudden we are trundling out of Dortmund.
It’s a 15-minute train from Dortmund to Essen. I get back to my hotel four hours after the final whistle.
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This is a typical scene from Germany’s European Championship: a sweaty, chaotic, and improvised experience where you are reminded at every turn at how difficult it has become to be a football fan. No travelling customers anywhere else in the world consistently pay so much to be treated so badly.
Uefa aggressively police the commercial aspects of their tournament – God forbid the logo of a non-official partner is glimpsed at any point – but were happy to delegate the vital business of transport and logistics to the local organisers.
That meant millions of football fans were put in the fumbling hands of Deutsche-Bahn, the train operators who put the Bahn in Bahnjaxed.
The entire infrastructure is antiquated, suffering from decades of under investment. The........