Ibrahim Ismail decided to make a placard for each of his five Syrian and Iraqi friends the moment he heard they would receive free tickets for the recent soccer match.
“They say, ‘Thank You, Hamburg,’ ‘Thank You, St. Pauli’ and ‘Many Thanks, Germany,’” Ismail said, showing off messages he had carefully printed, in German and Arabic, on scraps of cardboard with a black marker.
The six men proudly displayed their signs to thousands of German fans streaming into Millerntor-Stadion here. Almost all of the fans who passed them were wearing black T-shirts with the image of a skull and crossbones on the front, the emblem widely used by supporters of FC St. Pauli, a team in the second tier of German soccer.
A few days earlier, St. Pauli, known for its punk-rock ethos and social conscience, had offered 1,000 free tickets for an exhibition this week against Borussia Dortmund to recently arrived migrants, including Ismail and his friends.
The effort was a part of a larger response, spurred by the efforts of fan groups, that has brought the discussion of Europe’s migrant crisis into stadiums across Europe.
While national governments and the European Union continue to bicker over a response to the crisis, many soccer fans — especially those in Germany — have been raising banners of support. Now clubs are following their lead.
Bayern Munich has pledged $1.1 million to set up a training camp for recently arrived migrants, and Real Madrid and Paris St.-Germain have donated similar amounts. The Portuguese club Porto wrote to UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, asking that it have teams in the Champions League donate money from ticket sales to humanitarian efforts. The Italian club Roma, owned by the American Jim Pallotta, announced this week that it would donate more than $700,000.
“The final straw was seeing the pictures of refugees and seeing the 3-year-old kid dead on the beach,” Pallotta said in a telephone interview, referring to the pictures of Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian Kurdish boy found on a Turkish beach last week. Many have credited such images with changing public opinion about the migrants.
In addition to its financial donation, Roma has set up an initiative that encourages other clubs and fans to raise money for refugee charities. Pallotta said Roma had special reason to act because many of its players had been affected by past crises.
“No European club is city — or country — specific,” he said. “Look, we have Mohamed Salah from Egypt, Dzeko from Bosnia” — a reference to striker Edin Dzeko — and “Gervinho from Africa. A lot of players are directly related to where refugees are coming from or going to.”
In Hamburg, compassion has come on a more one-to-one level, from offerings of food and clothing to handshakes and legal advice. To refugees like Ismail and his friends, the aid has been a welcome surprise. “We feel there are still some people who love other people,” Ismail said.
“We feel like we are not alone during this difficult time,” added Ismail, who arrived in Germany two months ago from Raqqa, the Islamic State’s unofficial capital in northern Syria. Behind him in Millerntor-Stadion, a huge white banner with the words “Refugees Welcome” was unfurled, high in the stadium’s east stand.
Many of the migrants invited to St. Pauli’s match with Dortmund live in camps around this port city, including one that is a few minutes’ walk from the district that gives FC St. Pauli its name.
“A chance to meet the neighbors!” said Christian Pruess, who works for St. Pauli and has been in charge of the club’s response to the migrant crisis.
A few hours before kickoff, Pruess was smoking a cigarette inside St. Pauli’s empty stadium as his phone rang almost constantly. Like others, he views the humanitarian effort as more of a responsibility than an act of charity.
Besides donating the 1,000 tickets, St. Pauli raised 45,000 euros, more than $50,000, in 24 hours — to help finance a search-and-rescue boat in the Mediterranean.
“Always the club is without money — we are famous for it,” Pruess said of St. Pauli. “But we have credibility.”
The club’s roots are in the working-class St. Pauli neighborhood, known for the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s red-light district. It was here that the Beatles honed their trade in the early 1960s, and where social activism and radical politics often bleed into the stands of the Millerntor.
“We think we can provide more than just football,” Pruess said. “Not just about 90 minutes. We have a responsibility for the people around the club.”
Few take that responsibility more seriously than St. Pauli’s fans. Since 2004, the Ultras St. Pauli group has been visiting refugee camps around Hamburg, bringing clothes, food and lawyers to help the migrants navigate Germany’s complex asylum applications.
“It is a kind of radical way to support a football club; we are not just supporting a football club, but politically, too,” said Lucas, one of the youngest members of the group, which, unlike right-leaning and sometimes violent fan groups, campaigns on issues from racism to gay rights. As is common among members of hard-core European supporter groups known as ultras, Lucas declined to give his full name.
“It’s why I love this club,” Lucas added. “But German society is divided into two parts. One part supports the refugee struggle and wants to help.” The other, he said, believes the opposite. “They think, ‘We don’t need them; it’s too much; go back home,’” he said. “I can’t imagine how these people think.”
One Syrian whom the ultras met in a refugee camp, Megd Abo Amsha, was so taken by their commitment that he joined the group. Nine months ago, after an aborted attempt to reach Western Europe through Moscow shortly after he was drafted into the Syrian army, Amsha, 23, left his home in Damascus, crossed the mountains into Turkey and paid smugglers $6,000 to ferry him across the Mediterranean to Sicily. From there, he said, he took trains across Europe until he arrived in a camp in Hamburg. There, Amsha said, he met members of the Ultras St. Pauli who took him to a match.
“I was really scared,” he said. “I didn’t know who the people were, and I didn’t know what St. Pauli was. I had no idea where these guys were taking me, but when I got here, I found a really positive atmosphere. It felt like family.”
Amsha kept returning to the Millerntor, helping other migrants by translating with his newly learned German.
“Most of the Syrian people don’t believe in people who say they are helping anymore,” he said. “You don’t see people helping people for nothing. It is a matter of rebuilding some trust, rebuilding humanity.”
Last Tuesday night, the Millerntor had filled with a crowd of more than 25,000 by the time the players of St. Pauli and Borussia Dortmund walked onto the field, hand in hand with refugee children.
Several Dortmund players had their own histories of migration, including defender Neven Subotic, a Bosnian Serb whose family fled Banja Luka for Germany during the Yugoslav War and eventually settled in the United States, and Adnan Januzaj, whose Kosovar family fled to Belgium to escape the same conflict.
One banner in the crowd read, “Say It Loud, Say It Clear, Refugees Are Welcome Here.” Another proclaimed, “No Border, No Nation” in English and Arabic.
As has been the case for much of the past four seasons, St. Pauli quickly fell behind, conceding two goals before cutting into the lead with a goal by the American Fafa Picault. The match ended 2-1. After the final whistle, players from both teams walked to the four sides of the stadium, with St. Pauli carrying a banner that said, “Welcome,” and the Dortmund players displaying another that said, “Refugees.”
Later that evening, outside a bar underneath the east stands where St. Pauli fans drink beer after games, punk rock was playing at an earsplitting volume as the 1,000 or so migrants walked home to their camps.
“Too bad we didn’t win,” Amsha, the Syrian St. Pauli ultra, said before leaving early. He had a German exam Wednesday morning, part of the studies — cut short when he was called into the Syrian army — that he now hopes to complete.
“We can help build a society here,” he said. “This is the only society that gave us a chance to be part of it.”
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