Full of contradictions is the emotional location at VfL Bochum this week, in which a special time for this club could come to an end. With a defeat at the 1st FC Heidenheim on Friday evening (8:30 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker to the Bundesliga and at DAZN), the district club would have relegated in the Bundesliga after four years. The team would probably break apart, the contract of coach Dieter Hecking will lose its validity for the coming year.
But somehow a strange anticipation for this thriller was created in the Bochumers. “I knew from the first day that at some point the day was coming when we were about: hopp or top,” says Hecking. “I like such games. The team should not be fearful. For me, it’s about normality, normality, normality. There should be a giant anticipation.”
The players whose training had announced around 5000 fans on Thursday seems to be arriving. Midfielder Tom Krauss speaks of a “huge end game”. Defender Bernardo believes that “giving the pressure back to Heidenheim”, and Tim Oermann says: “We stand with our backs to the wall. But we have proven that we can still keep our nerves and are made for such special situations.”
The night of Düsseldorf should now help
Although Krauss, Bernardo and Oermann can also look at the game so casually because everyone knows because of their contractual constellations that they will soon appear for other clubs in the event of relegation. And Hecking, who had almost ended his coaching career, is already the winner of this Bochum season with his tidy and relaxed manner. He made himself interesting for other clubs in a new way. For VfL as a Bundesliga club, however, it is about a decisive course for the future.
Something special has grown on Castroper Straße in the four years since the ascent. The association has profiled itself as a kind of retro Bundesliga club, in which one can still experience the original charm of the Ruhrpott football. The narrative, which is not just a marketing gag, is: driven by a dedicated audience, an underdog is deflected with limited means, but with great cohesion against the economically superior opponents from the rest of the country.
As far as the quality of the experiences is concerned, the Bochum fans cannot complain: for example, the promotion 2021, the crazy victories over Bayern Munich, RB Leipzig or Borussia Dortmund and the relegation games from last year. Followers of VfL Wolfsburg, FC Augsburg, TSG Hoffenheim or Werder Bremen have undoubtedly experienced less memorable in the past four years than the Bochumers with their tendency to the extremes.
“This team was mouseoted”
There were spectacular twists after the change of coaches from Thomas Reis to Thomas Letsch (2022) and from Peter Zeidler to Dieter Hecking (2024). “This team was a mouse,” says Hecking, but the team “showed character for months”. Now it has the chance to win in Heidenheim – and to enrich the audience with another episode of this exciting Bochum football phase.
At the same time, however, a lot indicates VfL as the deserved relegation. “Kiel scores four goals in one game and we meet at most once,” says Tom Krauss, alluding to the past weekend. “It doesn’t help if we only say: ‘Yes, we were close’ or ‘it looked good’.” Bochum is the bottom of the table, has the worst goal difference, is also at the bottom of the second round table and has two points less in terms of sport than the 21 points that appear in the statistics.
The quality deficiencies force the Bochumers to plan as a precaution for the second division. A new sports director was just presented with Dirk Dufner, who could build a new team in the event of relegation due to the past four years with comparatively lavish TV funds. But in the difficult to calculate second division, a lot of money rarely also leads to climbing. It would be easier to win in Heidenheim, in order to add a new chapter to the old myth of the “undisturbable” in the remaining games against Mainz and St. Pauli.
