No one knows exactly when Europe’s largest grandstand acquired the name it is now famous for, although it is certain that this happened more recently than most people think.
The Yellow Wall at Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalen Stadium was described by German author and writer Uli Hesse in 2018 as something that Bayern Munich, that country’s most successful and powerful club, did not have: “a huge terrace that seemed like a return to the football world. Golden Age”.
This architectural beast can hold 24,454 spectators for Bundesliga matches – more than twice as many as Celtic’s legendary ‘Jungle’ in the 1960s, and only slightly less than the maximum capacity of the Kop at Anfield in the same period, a golden age in the Liverpool world. history.
“Unlike the Jungle or the Kop, the term Yellow Wall is not that old,” Hesse points out, using Kicker, the most popular football magazine in Germany, as a reference point for its relevance. It wasn’t until May 2009 that the description ‘Yellow Wall’ first appeared on the pages and that was due to the reflections of Dortmund’s then goalkeeper Roman Weidenfeller when he discovered that 10,000 of the club’s fans had traveled to a match against Eintracht Frankfurt.
“It’s unbelievable; even if we play outdoors, the yellow wall will be there,” Weidenfeller said.
It would be another 21 months before Kicker began using the phrase regularly, making it an established term in global football parlance.
This was around the time Dortmund won the Bundesliga two seasons in a row under Jürgen Klopp, who had transformed underperforming giants into a club competing for domestic and also European honours.
His Dortmund team would lose the Champions League final to Bayern at Wembley in May 2013.
This weekend the club have the chance to win the same trophy for the first time since their only league victory in 1997, at the same London venue. On this occasion the opponents are Real Madrid and Dortmund, who finished fifth in the league. the Bundesliga this season, 27 points behind champions Bayer Leverkusen, is a talented side but not quite in the same state of rude health as it was 11 years ago.
Thanks to Klopp’s charisma and performances, Dortmund became the second club for many football fans across Europe. Yet iconology 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 as you emerge from the bowels of the Westfalenstadion as an almost out-of-body experience.
Dortmund fans say goodbye and thank a departing Klopp in 2015 (Patrik Stollarz/AFP via Getty Images)
“This dark tunnel is exactly two meters high, and when you come out it’s like being born,” said the 1.80 meter tall Klopp. “You come out and the place explodes – out of the darkness and into the light. You look to your left and it looks like there are 150,000 people on the terrace all going crazy.”
Weidenfeller was a leader in Klopp’s side: “When you are the enemy you are crushed, but when you have him behind you as a goalkeeper it is a fantastic feeling.”
This view was supported by Bayern’s Champions League and World Cup-winning midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger, who later played for Manchester United and MLS team Chicago Fire. When asked if he was more concerned about Dortmund’s players or their manager Klopp, he replied: “It’s the Yellow Wall that scares me the most.”
The enormous scale of the structure offers an array of vantage points. “From the front of the lower level you can almost scratch the goalkeeper’s back – while high below the roof, where there is a slope angle of 37 degrees, it looks like a ski jump,” concluded the German news magazine Der Spiegel.
According to Hesse, Daniel Lorcher, born in 1985, was “more or less responsible” for creating the term Yellow Wall. In 2004, as Dortmund faced disaster on and off the pitch and their financial position grew bleak, the club’s leading ultras group produced a mosaic that paraphrased an Oscar Wilde aphorism: ‘Many walk through dark alleys, but only a few look to the stars.”
Lorcher was a leading member of The Unity, who stood in the center of what was then simply called the Sudtribune, just behind the goal. Their job was to make as much noise as possible, but Lorcher felt there were more opportunities in Dortmund because of the size of that stand. If the ultras could engage other fans and convince them, for example, to dress in bright yellow while holding flags and banners of the same color, the effect would be startling, helping Dortmund’s players and possibly also creating a more intimidating atmosphere for opponents to create.
Not only did this require a huge amount of fabric, but it all 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 over three miles of fabric and we produced 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 reached its final and Dortmund avoided oblivion, the flags “bathed the entire stand in yellow” before a home match with 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, South Stand Dortmund.”
Since 2005, the Westfalenstadion has been known as Signal Iduna Park after the club decided to use a sponsorship deal to pay off a debt, which was eventually paid off to bank Morgan Stanley three years later.
There were many factors contributing to Dortmund’s precarious financial state during that period, and one of these was the demand for stadiums to be converted into seating-only venues in the wake of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in England.
In the summer of 1992, the North Stand terraces of the Westfalenstadion were converted into seating areas, reducing the total capacity from 54,000 to less than 43,000. The club’s directors realized they could charge more money for a more comfortable experience, but there was reluctance to subject the southern Sudtribune (as it is still called by older Dortmunders) to the same treatment after conversations with fans, who made them realize that the terrace is the club’s only real marketing tool.
After Dortmund defeated Juventus 3-1 in Munich to secure the Champions League title in May 1997, the south stand was doubled in size. As the stadium became bigger and more secure, Dortmund spent more money than ever on players. But more success did not follow and in 2005 there was a real chance that the club would go bankrupt.
Today, Dortmund’s ground is the largest in Germany, while their average attendance in the Bundesliga is greater than any other Bundesliga club – including Bayern: this season Dortmund averaged more than 81,000 and Bayern, in their futuristic Allianz Arena, 75,000. Between Dortmund and the third and fourth placed teams (Eintracht Frankfurt and Stuttgart), the drop was almost 26,000, which is only slightly more than the capacity of the Yellow Wall alone, a terrace that could accommodate the population of a fairly large group. village.
The Yellow Wall salutes Marco Reus during his last home match this month (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)
Although the stadium’s capacity is being reduced to make it an all-seater stand on European nights, the three clubs with the lowest average attendances in the Bundesliga (Union Berlin, Darmstadt and Heidenheim) could have their entire crowds in the Sudtribune with room to spare; Yet the club has not really tried to gain economic benefit from it in any direct way.
Hessen even suggests that the Yellow Wall ‘hurts’ Dortmund in this sense, because ticket prices have been kept so low.
On average, season ticket holders pay €14 per match, but if Dortmund were to put seats there and charge more, Hessen says the club would lose a sense of soul.
The fact that Dortmund are not even in the top 20 clubs in Europe when it comes to matchday revenue according to the financial experts at Forbes and Deloitte (while they have one of the largest stadiums on the continent) reflects the attitude that exists in their region, the industrial heart of Germany. Instead, there is a residual financial benefit from the Yellow Wall, with companies such as chemical company Evonik, brewer Brinkhoff’s and pump manufacturer Wilo keen to be associated with a creation that is authentic to a working-class region of the country.
The Westfalen Stadium has become a tourist destination, but the Yellow Wall remains untouched for now.
The biggest decision for visitors, Hessen says, is whether they want to join the party on the patio or view the aura from a distance.
(Top photo: Alex Gottschalk/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
