Groundhoppers are football fans who earn points for visiting stadiums at games around the world.

They usually cause a stir when someone has once again managed to visit a football stadium and a game that goes with it in the last country on earth.

The species of football fans who are equally fanatical as they are keen to travel do not, of course, only direct their gaze to distant countries.

In their own country, too, the sports fields exert enough fascination to motivate people to attend games in district classes or district leagues.

Daniel Meuren

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Jonas Schulte, a journalist with the Hessischer Rundfunk, has appeared in a series of Arete-Verlag in “Fußballheimat Hessen”, and has collected beautiful places and very own views for such stadium and sports field aesthetes. Whether the Schloßblick stadium in Braunfels, which is not only worth a trip because of the 300 original seat shells from the old forest stadium, a football field in Gießen, Bernd Hölzenbein's regular sports field in Runkel-Dehrn in the Westerwald or the Dyckerhoff sports field of FV 02 Biebrich which the career of the other unforgettable Eintracht legend Jürgen Grabowski took off: Everywhere a whiff of football history wafts around these low-class places. With an eye for detail, the book has also unearthed special features such as three "Islands of the Blessed",where, for example, on a Werra island, the ball is sunk in the river as often as it is in the opposing net.

Evidence of megalomania turned to stone

But Schulte also tells stories like the one of the unsuccessful advertising of SC Opel Rüsselsheim for the car manufacturer in his city.

The footballers once gave themselves the name of the city-defining company, but Opel always fought off the efforts to love, which were later underpinned by the club colors black and yellow, and never became the hoped-for major sponsor - Bayern Munich had to come.

Some stadiums, such as that of Kastel 06 in the Mainz district on the right of the Rhine, are testimonies of the megalomania of patrons who wanted to satisfy their ego with a promotion to professional football, especially in the eighties and nineties, in amateur football. Most of the sports facilities that have remained that are now in a spirit of decay. Moss and bushes have taken over grandstands that no longer have to provide a place for thousands, but often only dozens of fans.

In some of the 100 locations, of course, a ball has never rolled: Schulte looks at buildings related to Eintracht and visits the current owners of the house in whose garden Horst Canellas caused the Bundesliga scandal in 1971 at a garden party he initiated by playing tape recordings kicked off postponed games and bribed players. This is one of the reasons why he succeeded in creating a nice mix of nostalgia, football history and pure football field aesthetics, which, if not immediately, should tempt you to go on weekend trips, but then perhaps at least to make stopovers when you are driving through a place with one of the football fields. Perhaps, however, by chance, your own club will play an away game in one of the jewelery boxes.

And real groundhoppers remain a consolation: The magic of discovery is far from extinguished by this book.

Even 100 locations are not enough to really cover all sports facilities that are capable of fascinating.

For those who want to add their own favorite spot, the publisher thankfully left a chapter blank at the end.

“Football home of Hessen - 100 places of remembrance”

, Jonas Schulte, Arete Verlag, Hildesheim 2021, 216 pages, 100 color photos, 18 euros.