SPORTS AND SOCIETY 523
which teams would qualify for the First Bundesliga, which turned out to
be Hansa Rostock and Dynamo Dresden.
One rather sticky issue was still when the East German and West Ger-
man soccer associations should be merged together into one national
association. DFB president Hermann Neuberger appeared to be rela-
tively immune to political pressure, just as he had been back in 1985. He
wanted to let things take their time, and he did not see a merger occur-
ring before 1992. This seemingly surprising reluctance stemmed from
commercial considerations in the run-up to the European Championships
in Sweden in 1992. Since West Germany and the GDR were supposed
to be part of one qualifying group with Belgium and Scotland, a Ger-
man-German national match was scheduled for the fi rst time since the
1:0 victory of the GDR in Hamburg, creating a little sports sensation. The
fi rst match was supposed to take place in Leipzig, and the second match
in Munich, and the lucrative contracts for TV rights and advertising had
already been signed. In light of the path to unity, however, the DFB’s
plans started to seem a bit absurd. The fi rst democratically elected pres-
ident of the GDR soccer association, Hans-Georg Moldenhauer, main-
tained that it was irresponsible to delay the unifi cation process in soccer
so long. He appealed to the DFB leadership: “Didn’t you see how the
Wall has come down? Don’t you know that an entire bloc has collapsed?
Armies have been done away with! The Stasi, and everything else has col-
lapsed and disappeared, and I am still supposed to head an independent
soccer association bearing the name of the GDR until ’92!”^114 In the end,
Neuberger conceded and gave his approval for a faster unifi cation of the
two German soccer associations. The merger offi cially took place on 21
November 1990 in Leipzig, the place where the DFB had been founded
originally. At this point, the West German national team had just won the
World Championships for the third time in Rome in July 1990, and the
win was already celebrated as a united German victory. In the wake of the
championships in Rome in 1990, the German “soccer emperor” (Fußball-
kaiser) Franz Beckenbauer was nonetheless mistaken in a prediction that
he euphorically and incautiously announced: “Once the GDR players join
team,” he claimed, “we will be unbeatable for years!”^115
Beckenbauer was not the only sports offi cial who was thinking about
how unbeatable his team might be in the years to come. As early as
March 1990, Wolfgang Schäuble, who was minister of the interior at the
time, anticipated the creation of a joint team for the Olympic Games in
Albertville and Barcelona in 1992.^116 Likewise, the fi rst free-elected East
German Minister-President Lothar de Maizière called for a unifi ed team
in his policy statement on 20 April 1990. Other countries in the West
reacted rather skeptically to the prospect of joint German sports teams.