The man has clearly had quite a night. His eyes are glazed over and his body is swaying with the rhythm of the train as it rattles back into town. He’s also carrying a square of grass as if it’s the most important thing he will ever hold. He has it in the palm of his hand, with his fingers splayed, like a waiter delivering a Michelin-starred meal to the table.
The train carriage is full and each time it pulls into a station, the standing passengers stumble a few strides and knock into one another. The man does, too, but he uses his body to protect the grass and fixes a glare at anyone who looks at it for too long. He need not worry. There are at least a dozen other passengers, some younger, some older, one much older, carrying their own squares of grass, each of them having also been cut from the Volksparkstadion pitch.
It’s Saturday night and after seven years in the wilderness, Hamburg have been promoted back to the Bundesliga.
Fans cut squares of turf from the pitch (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)
In the hours before, chaos.
Needing a win over lowly Ulm to seal their promotion, Hamburg fell behind to a scruffy set-piece goal. They were level quickly, but survived all sorts of chances and a missed penalty thereafter, before taking a lead that they would never lose late in the first half.
Ransford-Yeboah Konigsdorffer made it 2-1 with a gorgeous lob from outside the box and the Volkspark shook with relief. Minutes later, Davie Selke — their masked, warrior forward — thundered a header home at the back post and everyone knew then that it would be a night that nobody forgot.
By full-time, Hamburg had scored six. Each time, their goal music throbbed and flares burned in the stands. And when the game was over, fans poured onto the pitch from every side of the ground, and the players allowed themselves to be taken by those waves. Strangers held them aloft and kissed their cheeks. Some just held players tight, closed their eyes, and refused to let go.
Fans pour onto the pitch at full time (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)
By the end of the night, stories of people being hurt began to emerge.
On Sunday morning, the city’s fire department revealed that 25 people were hospitalised, with one person having suffered life-threatening injuries. It was a shocking detail because the mood in the stadium had been wild and uninhibited, but without the suggestion of any issues.
Red and blue flare smoke rose from the pitch, between flags bearing Hamburg’s famous rhomboid crest.
There were fans on the roofs of the dugouts and bouncing on the crossbars. At the northern end, the capo led choruses of call-and-response from his cage. Robert Glatzel, the centre-forward, found a microphone and led the whole stadium in chanting Mario Vuskovic’s name.
Vuskovic is serving a four-year ban after testing positive for EPO in 2022, a ruling which he and the club bitterly contest and which the fans have wholeheartedly rejected. Vuskovic goes to almost every home game. He was there on Saturday, too, down on the pitch and in the arms of supporters.
From high up in the press box, it looked like one of the biggest parties the city had ever seen. What a contrast to the mood that had descended upon the Volkspark seven years earlier, almost to the day.
Daniel Heuer Fernandes leads the fans through the post-match celebrations (Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images)
Hamburg have become a cautionary tale.
They were a founder member of the Bundesliga when it began in 1963 and, until 2018, were the only club to have never been relegated from it. A clock in the Volkspark commemorated the length of that stay and ticked on, season after season, until, after 54 years and 261 days, it came to a stop.
At the end of the 2017-18 season, Hamburg needed to beat Borussia Monchengladbach at home to have any chance of avoiding relegation. They also needed Wolfsburg to lose.
Hamburg were leading 2-1 late in the second half, but with Wolfsburg beating Koln 4-1, there was no hope and the atmosphere in the stadium turned hostile. Flares were thrown from the Nordtribune, where the club’s ultras stand, down onto the pitch. The game was delayed as the penalty box was consumed by dark, acrid smoke, and battalions of police officers were deployed to stare down the fans.
Police enter the field of play as the flares rain down at the Monchengladbach game in 2018 (Patrick Stollarz/AFP via Getty Images)
Hamburg deserved what happened to them. They had become increasingly dysfunctional throughout the decade, but their six German championships and one European Cup (1983) helped preserve their ego despite their tumble down the table and all sorts of anecdotal evidence.
In 2008, a young, up-and-coming coach affronted club officials by turning up to an interview in a pair of jeans, and his candidacy was pompously dismissed.
The coach’s name? Jurgen Klopp.
In 2015, a backpack belonging to sporting director Peter Knabel was found in a local park. It was full of sensitive club information and, initially, the discoverer phoned the club and tried to hand it in. Whoever they spoke to seemed less than concerned, though, and the good Samaritan’s next call was to Bild, Germany’s biggest tabloid.
On the pitch, they survived relegation play-offs twice. In the second of those, in 2015, only an 89th-minute free kick from Marcelo Diaz kept them out of the 2. Bundesliga. An extra-time goal was enough to overcome Karlsruhe and earn a reprieve.
But by 2018, Hamburg were a punchline and the club’s longevity brought them little sympathy around the country. They were seen as arrogant. A bit too puffed up with their own history.
When Gladbach fans travelled to the Volkspark for that game at the end of the season, they brought a banner with them mocking the stadium’s famous clock. Displayed from the away end in the second half, it showed the 30 minutes Hamburg had left in the division.
Hamburg’s players digest the reality of relegation seven years ago (Patrik Stollarz/AFP via Getty Images)
That mirth felt fair because it was assumed Hamburg would bounce straight back. Speak to fans who were there that day and they will tell you that they welcomed relegation as a relief. It was a moment of closure and the point from which a better, healthier club could perhaps start to grow back — and quickly.
Instead, the supporters were about to embark on a harrowing journey through 2. Bundesliga life. A ghost train of sporting humiliation.
In a division in which the top two earn promotion automatically and the third-placed team plays off against a team from the division above, they finished fourth in their first three seasons.
In years four and five, they made the play-offs.
The first time, in 2022, they beat Hertha BSC in the Olympiastadion and brought a 1-0 lead back with them to the Volkspark. But they lost the second leg 2-0. Worse, the architect of that defeat was Felix Magath, a club legend who had scored the goal that won them the 1983 European Cup.
When the final whistle blew that night and the Hertha players celebrated wildly, Magath didn’t join them. Instead, he just walked down the tunnel and out of sight.
A year later, they headed to Sandhausen on the final day of the regular season, knowing that if they bettered Heidenheim’s result, they would be promoted automatically.
They won. Meanwhile, Heidenheim were 2-1 down against Regensburg as their game approached stoppage time.
But there were 11 extra minutes added in Regensburg. Worse, the stadium announcer in Sandhausen mistakenly believed that the game was over and congratulated the travelling Hamburg fans on their promotion. They flooded onto the pitch in celebration and continued to chant and drink as Heidenheim scored an equalising penalty and began to lay siege to their opponents’ goal.
There was no phone reception. Nobody knew what was happening. Hamburg club officials desperately tried to get word to the pitch announcer, but it was too late. Tim Kleindienst scored Heidenheim’s winner in the 99th minute, clinching promotion, while the television cameras lingered on the Hamburg fans, still relieved that their Bundesliga exile was over.
It was a very dark comedy. When news finally filtered through, the promotion party on Sandhausen’s pitch became the world’s most despondent picnic, all sad faces and sunburn.
Hamburg fans celebrate prematurely at Sandhausen (Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)
Hamburg were the laughing stock. Again. They fell back into the relegation play-off and were dismantled 6-1 on aggregate by Stuttgart.
The year after, they finished fourth and never even really teased promotion. They were still the butt of the joke, though, as St. Pauli, their city rivals despite having nothing like the same budget or scale, went up as champions.
Every year, it seemed to get harder. Many of the players on the pitch on Saturday night have been through all of these experiences. Ludovit Reis, Daniel Heuer Fernandes, Jonas Meffert, Miro Muheim and Glatzel all played in the play-off against Hertha. Jean-Luc Dompe and Konigsdorffer lived through Sandhausen.
With each crushing low, the mental baggage has accumulated, leaving many of these HSV players fragile and freighted with neuroses. So much so that it was always going to take something unusual to break the cycle.
And this season has been unusual. It has been led by the goals of Selke, who has become an unlikely talisman, and by Merlin Polzin, a 34-year-old coach promoted from the bench after the sacking of Steffen Baumgart in November.
Selke, Hamburg’s masked man (Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images)
Polzin was born in Hamburg, he grew up a fan of the club and used to follow the team home and away. In the days before the game against Ulm, a picture of him circulated in the local press, showing him as a teenager, posing with a HSV flag on a long-forgotten away trip. His family still live in the area. His younger brother still plays for the local club that he did, until a bad injury forced him to stop and pursue a career in coaching.
Perfect. Of course, this is how such a chastening experience should end.
Despite never having had a full-time head-coach role before, Polzin is smart and credentialed. But the irony escapes nobody: HSV have tried everything to get back to the Bundesliga and appointed five different coaches in their seven years away, often at great expense, and in pursuit of some grand vision.
In the end, it isn’t a name or a personality that has led them back, but just a local boy who used to stand with the ultras in the Nordtribune and who, at the time of promotion, had 99 followers on an Instagram account set to private.
Polzin is soaked in beer during the post-match celebrations (Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images)
Polzin’s team wobbled towards the end. The closer promotion got, the more frightened Hamburg seemed to become. They suffered dreadful defeats by Eintracht Braunschweig and Karlsruher in recent weeks and somehow failed to beat a Schalke team who played with 10 men for 87 minutes. The past has stalked them. Reminders of promotions not realised have been everywhere.
But they made it; they got over the line.
It took at least an hour for all the players to get off the pitch. When they did and after they were able to barge their way back into the stadium’s catacombs, they began their trek to the top of the Volkspark.
It’s a staircase that starts in the basement, where the dressing rooms are located, and winds all the way up, past VIP lounges, bars and the media facilities.
As they climbed, more people followed. Photographers, fans, even Dino Hermann, the club’s giant blue dinosaur mascot, followed as they headed for the balcony on the top floor.
Wait for it. pic.twitter.com/Um0zHTk64v
— Seb Stafford-Bloor (@SebSB) May 10, 2025
There they sang with the fans, drenched Polzin in beer, and stood proudly above a public who have remained loyal through all these chastening, occasionally humiliating years. The long climb back is over at last.
Endlich.
(Top photo: Ronny Hartmann/AFP via Getty Images)