The big picture in this series cannot be complete without each part of it explored. This is I encourage people to check out previous posts before getting to this one.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Ugly Side Of Financial Fair Play
Part 3: Before The Berlin Wall Fell

After the separation of Germany into two halves, east Germany continued its work to show how better it is at sports than West Germany. However, that work didn't really include football which created a problem when West Germany faced Hungary in the 1954 FIFA World Cup final. The reason that was problematic is that people in east Germany were supporting their western counterparts.

People in east Germany also felt anxiety about losing their German identity to the Soviet Union or communism. People also really hated clubs sponsored or run by the Soviet Union, most of those often included the word "Dynamo" in their names. This is why you often see clubs with the "Dynamo" name in countries that used to be in the Soviet Union. "Dynamo" was like the Soviet Union sports signature or stamp.

Football Against the Enemy

In his book, Football Against the Enemy, Simon Kuper said that after the 1950s, the most hated club in east Germany was Berliner FC Dynamo and it was seen as the club which represented the authority. As time went by, the club was nicknamed the "Elevent Pigs". That's why people were mostly supporting their rivals, Union Berlin.

People were suspecting a relationship between Berliner FC Dynamo and The Stasi, a security or secret police. This relationship completely killed competition and allowed Berliner FC Dynamo to win a total of 10 league titles in east Germany back-to-back between 1978 and 1988. This was happening while football was flourishing in West Germany. This is where the gap between east and west started to get bigger.

The gap between the two countries wasn't always that big. In the 1974 FIFA World Cup, East Germany actually defeated West Germany 1-0. West Germany went on to win the trophy that year. That was the only time the two countries met. In the 1974 UEFA Champions League, which was won by Bayern Munich, Bayern Munich barely defeated East Germany champions at the time, Dynamo Dresden, in a 7-6 aggregate.

As little as the gap was at a certain point, it soon started to widen as days went by. Finally, it reached a level where East German clubs were used to losing to West German clubs all over Europe. Between 1973 and 1991, which is the period between the Soviet Union's decline and its final collapse, now you know when that happened, East German clubs faced West German clubs 17 times, and the West German clubs won 12 of them.

Escpaing The East

As time went by, a phenomenon started to happen as athletes in East Germany started to escape to West Germany. For the full picture, it wasn't just athletes who wanted to escape, it was most East Germans at the time. They had started to hear all about the western culture from which they were deprived, even small things like Jeans and burgers.

The first known incident of a player escaping was that of Frank Lippmann, who was playing for Dynamo Dresden at the time. After a match in the quarter-final of the European Champion Clubs' Cup which Dresden lost to KFC Uerdingen, no relation to the fast food chain, but yet another German club to defeat them. After the match, Lippmann escaped from the hotel. The search for him lasted for years until he was found. People in West Germany tried to recruit him as a spy to no avail, so they just let him go.

Another incident was Lutz Eigendorf who used to play for Berliner FC Dynamo, the "Eleven Pigs" club. After a match against FC Kaiserslautern, Eigendorf walked out of the bus as it was in a gas station and escaped using a taxi. The problem is that his wife and children were still in East Germany but that's how badly he wanted to escape. Eigendorf died four years later in a car accident after attending a party with his friends. It is said in the official report that he was drunk driving which many people in attendance dispute and claim he didn't drink at the party.

This is what started the great rumour that the Stasi were killing players who defected to West Germany. But, that's an issue for another time. What matters here is that 8 years after Eigendorf, the Berlin wall which separated East Germany from West Germany collapsed. 2 years after that, the Soviet Union itself collapsed.

How Does All of That Affect Our Topic?

Why would I dedicate two posts in a series about Bayern Munich talking about something that they barely mentioned? The reason for this matter is that once the Berlin wall collapsed, attempts to merge the east and west clubs into one league started which affected the entire history of German football.

The point of this and the last post is to show the factors which led to Bayern Munich losing its grip over German football in the 1990s as the collapse of the Berlin wall meant that many players and clubs were suddenly in West Germany's capitalistic system. This meant a lot of trouble for Bayern Munich as there is now an abundance of talent available in the market.

It was at this clinical moment when Bayern Munich started a chain of actions which were questionable at best and criminally disgusting at worse.