In the wake of a recent Federal Constitutional Court ruling, the Interior Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Herbert Reul, is urging Bundesliga football clubs to take measures to curb fan violence, warning that otherwise, they may face bills for police deployments at high-risk games in the future.
Reul’s response is a direct reaction to the court’s decision, which has deemed the practice of charging clubs for police services at high-risk games to be constitutional. “The most important thing about this ruling is perhaps the chance that the clubs finally realize: now it’s serious, and they must decide. Either the clubs ensure more safety and less violence in the stadiums and before them, or they will have to pay the price, sooner or later” Reul told the Welt am Sonntag.
The state should not be issuing such bills, Reul continued. “Police deployments should not have a price tag in my opinion. Providing for safety and order is a promise of the state to its citizens” the NRW Interior Minister said. “But public pressure on politics will only grow stronger after this ruling, to charge for such deployments, also in light of the growing budget problems.”
A warning is also coming from the security sector. “The ruling on police costs will significantly change the interior policy. In the face of tighter budgets, the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court will have a tempting effect on finance ministers” explained the head of the Police Union, Jochen Kopelke, in the Welt am Sonntag. It is “now up to the clubs and the DFL to make a proposal to reduce police working hours, because otherwise, a bill will follow another, and perhaps not just in football.”
The effects of the ruling are expected to be discussed in the Interior Minister’s Conference, with information suggesting that other major events may not be affected. This was also confirmed by Bremen’s Interior Senator, Ulrich Mäurer (SPD): “Our criteria, confirmed by the Federal Constitutional Court, exclude the possibility of other events incurring similar bills.” It must “be about events with a profit-oriented focus, with more than 5,000 participants, and/or a large potential for violence emerging from these events and their surroundings.” These criteria do not apply to the Bremen Freimarkt, the Oktoberfest in Munich, or the Evangelical Church Congress, according to Mäurer.
For the state of Berlin, the Senate has stated that, even after the decision, “we do not plan to involve clubs in additional costs for police deployments at high-risk games.” Many clubs cannot even shoulder additional costs and would be driven into a financial crisis, the Senate added. Baden-Württemberg’s Interior Ministry responded similarly, with a cautious tone: “Paying for police deployments does not reduce the causes of violence or the use of pyrotechnics in the stadium, nor does it add a single police officer.