It was the morning of Germany’s first game in the European Championship. That evening, the hosts would thrash Scotland 5-1 in Munich and begin a restorative footballing journey. It would end cruelly with a last-minute extra-time defeat to Spain in the quarter-finals but not before the national mood and the country’s relationship with its team changed for the better.
“I wanted to be part of it,” Anke, a Germany fan, says.
She is standing with her partner by the U-Bahn entrance in Marienplatz, the centre of Munich’s Altstadt (old town). In the background, the Flower of Scotland is rising and falling under the city’s town hall. The fans are mingling and taking photographs together — Scottish blue, tangled up with German white. And German pink.
Anke has the black, red and gold of the national flag painted in thin stripes on one of her cheeks. Most of the German fans who climb up the steps from the station and into the square are wearing white, but many — one in seven, perhaps — are, like her, dressed in the new pink away shirt.
By the end of the tournament, it would become one of Germany’s fastest-selling football jerseys of all time. Even on the first day, despite a hail of controversy upon its release three months earlier — for reasons nobody was certain of — it appeared to have captured a national mood.
But why? What was it that Anke wanted to be part of — and why in pink?
“I don’t know yet. But this is different,” she says. “The German national team has not been a good story for a long time. We won the World Cup (in 2014) and then…” Anke trails off, puffing out her cheeks. “Last time (Qatar in 2022), I could not care. This time, something has changed.”
Away shirts often cause a stir. Manufacturers need to differentiate year to year and that often leads to garish designs and, ultimately, criticism.
Germany’s pink kit found itself at the centre of a culture war.
Released on March 14, three months before the tournament, it broke dramatically with tradition. Germany’s home kit has always been white. Their change strips have either borrowed elements of the national flag and been black and red, or have otherwise been green.
Germany’s away kit for Euro 2024 — a primarily pink shirt with a purple pattern that goes from lighter to darker — was intentionally different from the norm. Manufacturer Adidas said that, with the design, it intended to “represent the new generation of German football fans, as well as the diversity of the country”.
Germany’s players celebrate their 2-0 win over Hungary at Euro 2024 (Kevin Voigt/Getty Images)
There were all sorts of grievances.
The kit was not manly enough. Its colour was not befitting a team of Germany’s standing. The tabloids gnashed their teeth over the absence of the traditional colours and then, on the day of release, Bild, the country’s biggest-selling daily, ran a survey revealing that 48 per cent of respondents thought that the shirt was “completely wrong”, with only 31 per cent approving of it.
It was denigrated as “the diversity shirt” and “the Barbie kit”.
Dr Holger Blask is the CEO of the Deutscher Fussball-Bund (DFB), the German Football Association. He tells The Athletic that were risks involved in the design but the DFB and Adidas felt confident that they were creating something that the public wanted and were ready for.
“The same way as they have done for many years now, Adidas approached us at an early stage with suggestions and design ideas,” says Dr. Blask. “Those were based on broad-based market research and surveys. The outcome was that the fans wanted a classic home jersey and a ‘bold’ or ‘different’ away jersey. The DFB fully supported the proposals.”
Marina Mogus, the general manager for Adidas Central Europe, expands on that process.
“Both the home and away jerseys were developed in close consultation with national youth players, amateur athletes and football communities,” she tells The Athletic. “The outcome was that the home jersey should remain in the classic colours, meaning it should be black-red-gold while carrying the eagle (depicted on the German national team’s crest). Just ‘typical German’.
“The away jersey was a different matter. With a young target group in mind, there was a clear focus on being bolder than what we’ve done in the past. Together, the two jerseys are an interplay of old and new symbols, fresh and progressive. A new, surprising and iconic design that represents the multifaceted Germany.”
But it was a risk. Creating a new collection ordinarily takes around two years and while the DFB and Adidas had a fixed point in the future to plan around — the hosting of the European Championship — judging the mood in the country and how the kit would be received could never be that precise so far in advance.
Really, the only inevitable aspect was the backlash.
“The German away jerseys have already had different colours in the past, from green to red to black,” says Dr Blask.
“So, while pink is a new colour for Germany, it’s not exactly a break with tradition. The intention was for the current away kit to represent the new generation of German football fans and the diversity of the country. But new jerseys are often the subject of controversy in the media and online and, in this case, we had obviously alerted Adidas to the risk of potential resentment that could arise — and the result was the ‘This is a German shirt? Oh yes, it is!’ campaign.
Released three days after the kit announcement, the video pre-empted many of the criticisms the pink shirt would likely be subjected to and was able to mock them almost in real time. It featured a starred cast of contemporary players, former greats, and Gen Z influencers, such as Aleandra Frerk and Elias Nerlich, and struck a tone that was more modern and appealing.
As with the video made to announce the new home kit, it flirted mischievously with national stereotypes. Is it still typically German to be punctual, intolerant of spicy food and aggressively protective of cycling lanes?
“Was ist typisch Deutsch?”
Increasingly, nobody is quite sure, but there has been virtue in acknowledging that fluidity — and doing so has proven a rare success for the DFB, who have not had a close relationship with German football fans over the past decade.
Since winning the 2014 World Cup, their reputation has suffered through isolated scandals and perceived over-commercialism.
The ‘Die Mannschaft’ branding of the national team, introduced in 2015 but retired in 2022, was symptomatic of that. Foreign fans adopted it. Many still use it now. In Germany, it was generally rejected and widely disliked, and used to illustrate the gulf between the DFB and the people.
Other anecdotes describe that disconnect more vividly. Germany’s participation at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was extremely unpopular. Between the 2018 tournament in Russia and that competition, the domestic television audience for the national team’s games roughly halved. Germany’s cycle of poor performance hardly helped, either — they were eliminated at the group stage in both tournaments — but the ideological issues were just as damaging.
In the build-up to Euro 2024, there was a clear intention to repair some of that damage.
For instance, when Julian Nagelsmann’s squad was first announced, the reveal was taken out of the hands of traditional media. Instead, the DFB employed members of the public, social media personalities and people with an actual connection to the players. Antonio Rudiger’s inclusion was announced by one of his oldest friends, a kebab shop owner from Berlin, who broke the news with his grill in the background. The same kebab shop later catered for the German national team at Herzogenaurach, their training base, during the tournament.
(Pau Barrena/Getty Images)
Those were small gestures but they contributed nonetheless and helped to encourage a nation to buy in — to the football, yes, but to everything else associated with it. The spirit, the optimism and the pink shirts.
It would be a simpler story if they had only been worn by the young. Restless youth provoking ageing conservatism or something similar. But no: men, women, children, pensioners; it was worn by people from all across society, with no clear connection to each other.
Two weeks into the tournament, Germany were flying. Unbeaten and having topped their group, the country had been gripped by possibility. The fan zones were full. Andre Schnura and his saxophone were surfing crowds of thousands and the pink shirt was on every street and station platform, and — increasingly — it was harder to find.
By then, it had been announced that it was the fastest-selling away shirt in the history of the German national team.
“The demand significantly exceeded our planned quantities,” Mogus tells The Athletic. “We will sell more than three times as many jerseys as we initially calculated.”
It never hurts a supplier to have a shortage or to be able to report that stocks are low but, back in Munich, that seemed true. The two Bayern Munich fan shops, commandeered for tournament duty, were both out of the away shirt in adult sizes. The sports store in the basement of the Galleria shopping centre only had purple shorts and no shirts at all.
Sporthaus Schuster is one of the oldest sports shops in Munich and a few days before Germany faced Denmark in Dortmund, they were waiting for a fresh delivery.
“We’ve sold thousands,” says a worker behind the checkout.
“When we get new stock, it’s never just that shirt by itself — so I don’t know how many we’ve got in — but we’ve had four or five deliveries since the tournament started.”
(Jasmin Walter – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
Schuster is a proper sports store. It sells tennis rackets and hiking equipment, alpine gear and running shorts. It has a climbing wall running beside its staircase but its ground floor is dedicated to Euro 2024, and an army of mannequins showed shirts from every nation.
In one corner, just by the entrance, a worker punched names onto the backs of new replica shirts — and those are exclusively German. As he did, he allowed The Athletic to chat with customers as they brought their shirts forward.
One man was simply buying one for his son — all his friends had it already, he said with a weary look. Another was getting one for himself. Actually, he said, he wanted to find the proper version, the one that costs €150 (£126/$163), but was happy with the replica (€100) edition because he just likes the way it looks. A younger man, maybe in his mid-twenties, with a tattoo spidering out from beneath a black T-shirt sleeve, told The Athletic that pink is better than white because it makes beer stains less noticeable.
Was it a protest shirt or a statement? To some, possibly. With its acknowledgement of the changing nature of German nationality and society, did some who may have previously felt connected to a Germany shirt feel more comfortable wearing it? Maybe.
But the broader truth is likely simpler. A football shirt means little if the team wearing it is not playing well. For most of the summer, Germany did that and certainly helped to feed the euphoria that surrounded them. Away shirts tend not to sell well unless they look good and are attached to a clever marketing campaign. This is a story of consumerism, after all, and those advantages were clearly in place, too.
The further into the tournament Germany went, the more it became clear that this was a case of being in the right place at the right time — or of supplying the right shirt for the right moment.
(Sebastian El-Saqqa – firo sportphoto/Getty Images)
In the hours before what would be Germany’s last game at the tournament, Erik was stood outside Stuttgart main station, opposite the hotel where a throng of fans were waiting for the Spanish team to depart for the MHPArena.
He and his son do not have tickets, but they were going to the fan park in Schlossplatz to watch the game. Both of them are wearing the pink shirt; the boy has Maximilian Mittelstadt’s name on the back of his.
Yes, he said, they were Stuttgart fans and — yes — it would have been cheaper to get Toni Kroos’s name.
“The shirts are just fun,” says Erik. “Have you been to the fan parks? There are so many people wearing them and having a good time, with the singing and everything like that. It’s how we join in with that.”
So, what was the shirt and what was its role in Germany’s summer? It was all things to anybody who wore it. Something meaningless, something important. It marked people out on their own terms and then let them belong.
GO DEEPER
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(Top photo: Markus Gilliar – GES Sportfoto/Getty Images)
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