Right now.

Florian Voigt tore his Achilles tendon before the Eintracht game in Barcelona.

So friends got him a wheelchair, pushed him halfway across the city in Catalonia and to the stadium, where he was allowed to use a lift to get to his seat in the huge arena where Eintracht defeated big FC phenomenally 3-2 Barcelona won.

Florian Voigt took it all on himself, "it was madness", although, as he says, "it was actually unreasonable".

But now the Eintracht fan has to sit out his injury, of all things at his home game in London.

Because Florian Voigt, born in Giessen, worked in Frankfurt for ten years, has been living in the metropolis with nine million inhabitants for 13 years.

The English capital has become his homeland, here his children were born,

Daniel Schleidt

Coordinator of the economics department in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Only one thing Voigt is missing in London: German football.

In order to pursue his love of the sport at least from a distance with like-minded people, Voigt founded the Eintracht fan club "Eagles of London" with a few like-minded people.

A fan club for a club from Frankfurt, and that in a city that has plenty of top-flight football in the English Premier League to offer with Chelsea, West Ham, Tottenham, Brentford, Watford, Crystal Palace and Arsenal?

Passion of the Eintracht friends

For Florian Voigt this is not a contradiction in terms.

"The English envy Germany and especially Frankfurt for the fan culture," says Voigt, but quickly adds: "Even if they would never admit it." The passion of the Eintracht friends is now known all over Europe and is admired.

The European football association Uefa aggressively advertises with pictures of choreos at home and huge fan marches at away games, where locals stand on their balconies and film the crowds from Hesse.

On the trip to London, the Frankfurters show how this culture works.

It is Wednesday afternoon when Florian Schmidbauer is sitting in the car with three friends on the way to Basel.

Schmidbauer is part of the "Eagles around the world" fan club, which has members all over the world: in Colombia, the Philippines, Sudan, Ethiopia and of course in England.

During the quarter-finals in Barcelona, ​​when Eintracht surprisingly led 2-0 at half-time, Schmidbauer had already tried to book cheap flights for the London trip in the stadium.

Others had the idea too, the prices skyrocketed, “direct flights from Frankfurt were unaffordable”.

So he and his buddies switched to Basel.

The creativity of the people of Frankfurt on the way to destinations all over Europe knows no bounds, not even on the trip to London.

Schmidbauer tells of friends who fly to London from Hamburg, others come from Brussels, Munich, Cologne and Nuremberg.

The Eintracht fan club Bergen-Enkheim has chartered a bus, many others like Sebastian Finke travel by car, having previously offered other fans rides on social media.

Mood on the Thames ship

Florian Schmidbauer himself already has tickets in his pocket, but as is usual with Eintracht away trips, not everyone who wanted one received tickets.

3000 were allocated to Eintracht as the official contingent for the guest curve;

the club received more than three times as many inquiries.

Schmidbauer reports of friends who got hold of them “through other channels”, a handful even flew to London without tickets and, if in doubt, watched the game in a pub.