Timelines

With the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazi Party, the “National Socialist Reich League for Physical Exercise” was also dissolved. As a result, clubs and associations were banned. Many German athletes had been killed in the war and most sports facilities had been destroyed by bombing, yet the first public sporting events took place shortly after the defeat of the Nazi regime in May 1945. Almost 20 years after the end of the war, in August 1963, the German Bundesliga opened its first official season. Although many “guest workers” had been recruited to the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1950s, they were massively underrepresented in sports clubs. For example, in the 1972/73 Bundesliga season, only six percent of professional soccer players had a foreign passport. The first player without a German passport to be signed by a Bundesliga club was Aykut Ünyazıcı, who came to Braunschweig from Turkey in 1958 to study. At the start of the Bundesliga, clubs were only allowed to sign two foreign players. It was not until 1992 that the rules changed across Europe: the so-called “3 + 2” rule meant that clubs could no longer field more than three foreign players at the same time in a match. In addition, only two players who have played in Germany for at least five years are allowed to play for their club. These are referred to as “assimilated” players. Erdal Keser, who grew up in North Rhine-Westphalia, is the first son of migrant workers to play for a Bundesliga club (Borussia Dortmund). Today, people with their own or family migration backgrounds play not only in German soccer clubs, but also in the German national teams. The best known among them are Mesut Özil, Sami Khedira, and Gerome Boateng. However, the proportion of people with migration backgrounds in other German sports is significantly lower. In the women's Bundesliga, which was founded in 1989, there are fewer players with their own or family migration backgrounds compared to the men's Bundesliga. In some Bundesliga clubs, there have been none at all for a long time. Today, players can also be found in the national team, including Fatmire Alushi (also known as Lira Bajramaj) and Dzsenifer Marozsán.