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efficiency. reliability. Feature.
This is the refrain many people are most familiar with about Germany, but so far at Euro 2024, none of these clichés have been proven to be true. Tournament organizers have been working to control crowds outside stadiums. Fans experienced miserable conditions on their way to and from the game. Metro and rail services within host cities were brought to a standstill due to the extra demand.
This is not what the rest of Europe expected.
Euro 2024 kicks off in Munich on Friday night. The city is used to serving large football crowds, with Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena seating 80,000 people selling out every game year after year.
Journeys from the city center are usually simple, with the U-Bahn (underground) heading north, taking fans to Frottmaning station, a 10-minute walk from the stadium. For larger games, it can get hectic. But off the pitch, for the Bundesliga and the Champions League, everything is working well and the fans are finding the areas they need.
Friday night, it was a completely different story. The line from Munich to Flotmanning came to a standstill. The train stopped for a long time on the platform and in the tunnel and was getting more and more crowded. The weather was warm in Munich, especially in June, and thanks to the German and Scottish supporters, the atmosphere remained calm despite being packed into each other with no room to move.
Outside the Allianz Arena – as has been the case at other games since – there was chaos. For Bayern games, fans will see signage for specific entrances depending on where they sit in the stadium. On Friday, zoning failed, resulting in long lines in front of the venue. Some stayed out for hours.
When reaching the front of the line, many fans had no choice but to push through the crowd to find the entrance, much to the chagrin of others who misunderstood what was happening, leading to some brief confrontations.
The organization of the Bundesliga is generally excellent across the country. Many of the fans in attendance, especially those from Germany, had been to the Allianz Arena before, but this time it was completely different.
The first game of a major tournament often brings opening night troubles and problems, but something strange happened in Munich – and that was just the beginning.
Fans line up outside Gelsenkirchen Arena on Sunday (Oguz Yeter/Anadolu via Getty Images)
England face Serbia in Gelsenkirchen on Sunday night. There were endless bad stories before and after the game.
Tram services from the station to the out-of-town stadium Ofschalke Arena have been so gridlocked and congested that some fans have chosen to walk the entire distance – about an hour and a half from the city center station. England’s 1-0 victory ended up becoming a subplot in a tale of crying children, heavy rain and, in many cases, chaos.
England fan Steve Grant, who follows the team at home and abroad and does take public transport to get to the ground, said overcrowding at stations was “dangerous” and “if you were standing on the edge of the platform you would be using your The entire weight “prevents oneself from being pushed onto the track.” “No crowd control measures were taken at all,” he said.
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After the game, the scene became even more chaotic. Another England fan, Alex, described the scene at the main train station as “absolute chaos”, even hours after the final whistle. He decided to return by public transport while another friend walked back – arriving half an hour before him.
“I couldn’t believe how busy the main station was,” he said. “When we heard our train platform announcement, people ran at full speed to get there – I can’t imagine what it must be like to take the kids to the game. Then, when we got to the platform, there were no trains left. We ended up We arrived back in Dusseldorf (theoretically a 30-minute intercity train ride) after 2 a.m.
Rich Nelson was also in Gelsenkirchen on Sunday evening with a friend of his who uses a wheelchair.
“It’s a real mess,” he said. “The trains were moving into different parts of the platform without any notice, so there were hundreds of people running around. The platform was changed and the Essen train was passing when it was announced that it was bound for Dusseldorf, and one of the trains looked Looks like an old British Rail train.
“Thanks to a few people moving and holding the door, we managed to squeeze in, but the train took an hour to get to Düsseldorf. For us, the train was the worst and most unreliable part of the weekend. In None of the several trains we took ran on time and despite us booking a ramp (for wheelchairs) the Deutsche Bahn staff last night were not interested in helping.
Gelsenkirchen is one of the smallest host cities for Euro 2024. It’s an industrial town with relatively little nightlife, less appeal to traveling supporters, and fewer hotel rooms than most towns. On race day, transportation systems inevitably come under huge pressure.
Deutsche Bahn (DB) is a company that operates Germany’s private, government-funded railway network. It was once the gold standard for rail travel in Europe, but today it’s still far from that peak, and hasn’t been for some time.
While people outside Germany are alarmed by the delays, those living in the country are all too familiar with Deutsche Bank’s woes. The train is late. The train isn’t coming. Trains change destinations without warning. Connections are broken and people are stranded.
Sitting in the DB carriage when the delays were announced, notice the glances the Germans exchanged and how they rolled their eyes; it has become a bit of a joke, and while some of the problems with Euro 2024 are surprising, there are endless delays and disruptions on the train network Not among them.
This is a complex problem with no obvious solution.
A train in Euro 2024 colors at Berlin’s Olympiastadion S-Bahn station (Andreas Gora/Photo Alliance via Getty Images)
The services provided by DB are enshrined in the German Constitution. The federal government has a responsibility to maintain services that serve the public interest—both in terms of their cost and their reliability.
The recent trends are alarming. In 2020, the train punctuality rate exceeded 80%. In 2021, this proportion is 75%. By the summer of 2023, on-time performance had dropped below 60%, below DB’s publicly committed target of 70%.
One of the most famous statistics (and certainly the most repeated in the German media) is that in 2022, more than 33% of long-distance trains were late for their destination (defined as being at least six minutes late). This is the lowest level in 10 years.
In response to a request for comment for this article, a DB spokesperson said the company was “doing everything we can to allow fans to attend games on time and stress-free”.
They said the rail system was “absolutely full at the moment” and Deutsche Bahn was “basically running every train we have”.
Sabrina Wendling of the Pro Rail Alliance, a nonprofit interest group dedicated to promoting and improving rail transportation, said the problems we’re seeing are a legacy of underfunding nearly 30 years ago.
“What we are experiencing now is a heavy burden on a railway that has been neglected for too long – while traffic continues to grow,” she said.
“The past government has had a road-first policy, so most of the country’s investments have gone towards roads. The current government has changed that. But now investment demand is so high that it will take years to improve the current state of infrastructure .
“Additionally, there is an acute driver shortage almost everywhere in the country (not just trains, but buses and trucks too). A lack of drivers usually means unsatisfactory service frequency. This becomes true when more people than usual use public transport. Very obvious.
DB themselves admit that their infrastructure is in poor condition. In a state of the network report published in March 2023, they described it as “prone to failure” and cited the number of signal boxes, switches and level crossings in poor condition.
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Over the past 30 years, the size of the network (measured in track length) has also been shrinking. At the same time, as Wendling described, the number of services running on it has been steadily increasing. The result is increasing pressure on networks that have suffered from a lack of investment. Since 1994, about half of the switches on the network have been removed, making it harder for trains to pass each other, so it’s even more important that everything runs on time, and if it doesn’t, the impact is even greater.
There are other inconveniences and confrontations across the web. With more than 200,000 employees, DB is one of Germany’s largest employers, but there are still staff shortages across the network. The station PA system is a minor nuisance. While messages are almost always provided in German and English, the acoustics can be poor, making announcements difficult to hear. This can be especially difficult for someone new to the web during times of stress or when platform changes are announced.
A bigger issue is the company’s sheer size. A long-running conversation with no end in sight concerns whether Deutsche Bahn should be broken up to make it easier to manage while also introducing more competition into German rail services.
It’s certainly not hard to see how a cycle of defeat could develop, or why it’s so dysfunctional in the current tournament. The bottom line is that this problem has existed for decades before Euro 2024 and will continue for many years to come. While large investment projects are underway, including building new lines and adding more connections between Germany’s major cities, the result is a huge burden on taxpayers and, ironically, more damage caused by the projects themselves .
Where will the championship go from here?
There are still parts of it that are going well. The atmosphere in the stadium is great and the quality of the football itself has been outstanding so far. The Germans are also great hosts, and from Hamburg in the north to Munich in the far south, the country is full of food, drink, architecture and history that will make attending this European Championship a rich experience.
Many of the volunteers, who are not paid by UEFA, are clearly doing their best in difficult circumstances and working extremely hard to help people. Although there are also crowding issues in the fan zone, it is clear that a lot of thought has been put into providing entertainment for fans during the game. In Munich on Sunday, as chaos broke out in the Ruhr Valley, people enjoyed watching the action on a series of big screens next to the large lake in the Olympic Park, with activities and live music held between games to entertain children and families.
But for now, the bad stories stand out. Considering how much of an impact they have on the tournament right now, that’s likely going to be the case for a while.
Additional reporting: Dan Shelton
(Above: Simon Stacpoole/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
