In an age in which mega-clubs owned by sheikhs or oligarchs dominate world football, the East German Oberliga – which operated behind the iron curtain – certainly sounds appealing. It was a league with no billionaire owners, agents or transfer fees, in which footballers and coaches were employed by the state and clubs had honest names like Lokomotive Leipzig, Turbine Weimar or Motor Suhl.
But Stasi FC, a terrifying new Sky documentary, serves as a reminder that real socialism was just as capable of building crushing monopolies as turbo-capitalism. East Berlin super-club BFC Dynamo may have won the German Democratic Republic’s championship for a record-breaking 10 years on the trot, but it did so by being a bullying behemoth that makes teams like Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain look like well-meaning grassroots initiatives, and the terraces of Millwall FC like a haven of political correctness. It used the secret police to spy on its own players, and brutally retaliated against footballers who made the switch to West German football – potentially going so far as to assassinate them.
