**Longlisted for the Telegraph Sports Book Awards 2021 - Football
Book of the Year**
FC
St. Pauli is a football club unlike any other. Encompassing music,
sport and politics, its fans welcome refugees, fight fascists and
take a stand against all forms of discrimination. This book goes
behind the skull and crossbones emblem to tell the story of a
football club rewriting the rulebook.
Since
the club's beginnings in Hamburg's red-light district, the chants,
banners and atmosphere of the stadium have been dictated by the
politics of the streets. Promotions are celebrated and relegations
commiserated alongside social struggles, workers' protests and
resistance to Nazism. In recent years, people have flocked from all
over the world to join the Black Bloc in the stands of the Millerntor
Stadium and while in the 1980s the club had a small DIY punk
following, now there are almost 30,000 in attendance at games with
supporters across the world.
In
a sporting landscape governed by corporate capitalism, driven by
revenue and divorced from community, FC St. Pauli demonstrate that
another football is possible.
