The big, green W
Unlike their counterparts in Spain, England and France, German clubs treat the year of their foundation with such reverence that it almost always forms a part of the official club name.
The team commonly known as 'Gladbach', for instance, is technically called 'VfL Borussia 1900 Mönchengladbach'. Many clubs are even referred to by contractions that point out when they were formed: Schalke 04, Bayer 04 (Leverkusen), Mainz 05, BVB 09 (Dortmund), Hannover 96 and of course Munich 1860. Many more at least carry the dates in their club badge, like Bochum, Düsseldorf, St. Pauli or Duisburg do. (VfB Stuttgart's logo said '1893' but not 'Stuttgart' until 1999.) But take a look at the club who's topping the Bundesliga table now. Its official name is simply 'VfL Wolfsburg', which for legal reasons only should be followed by a 'Football Ltd.' since the professional football division was turned into a company in 2001. The club badge displays a fat, green 'W' and that's it. If this makes you suspect there must be more to it, well, you're right. However, before we disclose a truly strange history, a brief excursion may be necessary. 'VfL' means 'Club for Physical Exercises'. Those exercises are badminton, basketball, bowling, swimming, dancing, scuba diving and a dozen other sports besides, among them 'Wushu', a martial art and, no, I'm not pulling a fast one on you. It's simply that Wolfsburg are like any other German club: They were formed as a public, non-profit, multi-sports organisation that offered kids and adults various diversions, football being just one of many. Which leads us back to the badge with no date. VfL Wolfsburg were founded as late as September of 1945, which means they are the most tradition-free club in the German professional game, apart from the teams that come from the former GDR. (Where the state reorganised the whole sporting structure after the war). There is a saying that goes: 'If three Germans go together anywhere, the first thing they do is form a club.' So why didn't Wolfsburg have a club before the war? Easy. There was no city. 'Wolfsburg' means 'Wolf's Castle', and that's basically all this place amounted to until the late 1930s: a castle dating back to the 13th century. Then, in 1931, an automobile designer by the name of Ferdinand Porsche began entertaining the idea of building a simple, good car that anyone could afford, in other words: a 'people's car', or, in German, a 'Volkswagen'. Two years later, Porsche met the new Chancellor of the Reich, Adolf Hitler, and the two realised they had the same goal, as Hitler was very interested in motorising Germany. (Though his motives were quite different from Porsche's.) In 1936, three prototypes were built and ran so smoothly that Hitler agreed to mass production. In 1938, he himself laid the foundation stone for a gigantic car plant, not far from the old Wolf's Castle and a village called Fallersleben, the birth place of the poet who penned the words to the German national anthem. That plant was, of course, the 'Volkswagen Werk', though Hitler referred to the car as the 'Kraft durch Freude' ('Strength through Joy') or KdF-Car. Thousands of people went to Fallersleben to build the factories and then the cars, thus a new city was planned around the plant. It was called 'The City of the Kdf-Car' (I kid you not!) until 1945, when it was renamed for obvious reasons and has since been known as Wolfsburg. Wolfsburg's club was quite successful, winning, among other things, a gold medal at the 1972 Olympics. However, that medal went to a track-and-field athlete, as the club's football division was, shall we say, lagging behind in terms of performance.
