Letter from Germany: mind the gap as creaking rail system delivers travel chaos for fans

CHAOS: Fans gather on train station ahead the Euros match between Serbia and England in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. AP Photo/Markus Schreiber.

A soaking sideways Rhine-Ruhr rain was giving us a little palate teaser of what it’d be like if the Shetland Islands ever gets to host a Euros.

To be fair, those showers would prove to be a spritz compared to the biblical deluges which greeted Turkey and Georgia here 48 hours later.

But back to Gelsenkirchen. Sunday had become Monday which meant the thousands trapped in a static queue for trams that were never coming had, technically, been queuing for days as well as minutes and hours.

The Irish press pack needed to get from Gelsenkirchen back to base in Dusseldorf (40 minutes, usually) but first had to get from Arena AufSchalke to Gelsenkirchen’s central station (16 minutes, usually).

If things fell for you, it’s a trip which could be done under the hour. Things did not fall for anyone. They fell apart.

Ahead was trampocalypse but down a stairs to the right were two busses where lanyarded people got on and, wonder of wonders, found seats.

Hope rose through the rain and we approached clipboard man in the Uefa tracksuit to ask if the bus is going to either Gelsenkirchen station or even Dusseldorf.

“No,” is the one-word response. When we started a follow-up enquiry, Uefa man cut us off. “I’m sorry, we only care about our bus to Dortmund.” Splendid, thanks.

On Tuesday night Portugal and Czech Republic faced off in Leipzig, the last of the 10 tournament host venues to join the party. After five days we’ve now seen every city and every team.

So welcome to Euro 2024 then, to Uefa’s grandest show, where the organisers only care about their bus and everyone else?

“Bock deine eigene ziege” is the German for buck your own goat. Let’s go with that.

Forewarned is forearmed and in their defence, the locals had been sounding the alarm about the reliability of Germany’s national rail firm, Deutsche Bahn, which has been a symbol of the host nation’s era of national decline. But in its defence, DB hasn’t been the lone or even most egregious failure.

The first five days of Euro 2024 have essentially witnessed an almost complete systems collapse. Trams and busses, underground and overground, regional networks and high-speed intercity, they’ve all croaked and creaked under the pressure of numbers which were known years in advance.

Tucked away in ITV’s comfort in Berlin, the only host city so far which worked mildly as advertised, Roy Keane could give us a ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ for old time’s sake.

Sunday’s nightmarish journey ended up taking the guts of five hours, door to door or media centre to cot. Some fans gave up altogether and walked huge distances.

The England supporter who fell asleep in his seat and woke to find himself locked in and abandoned at Arena AufSchalke got more rest than the 49,999 who’d left.

For the hundreds of thousands who have saved and scraped to make it here and experience the uniquely exhilarating energy of major tournament football, organisational chaos has been inescapable and has sapped at least a little of that energy.

There are smaller issues too: signage to point you where to go when you do mercifully get off a tram is badly lacking, volunteers have been left dreadfully ill-informed.

On Monday in Dusseldorf for France-Austria, four Uefa helpers gave us four different answers to the question “so, uh, how do we get in?”

Deutsche Bahn’s problems run deep, the company lost an unfathomable €2.35 billion last year, €6.4m a day.

But Uefa’s ineptitude ain’t shallow either. The issues getting in and out of and around stadiums for big European occasions has been a feature rather than a bug for three years now.

The mayhem of the 2021 final in Wembley and almost-tragic near-misses of back-to-back Champions League finals in Paris and Istanbul showed the utter and shameful disregard the organisation has for fans.

It was naive to think that those bad days would spark something better here. Things don’t get better anymore.

The new kettle that lasts five weeks before glitching, the re-gen slop served up by Hollywood, the jeans that fray on the inside left thigh after a couple of months (just me?).

The enshittification of so many aspects of our daily lives has now come for a beloved staple of every four summers and ultimately that falls at Uefa’s feet.

According to close watchers at least part of this is down to a talent drain in Nyon with Fifa poaching some key Uefa staffers.

Aleksander Čeferin has overseen all of this to the point it now feels a key thread of his presidency.

In response to the glut of issues, local, national, the Uefa messaging has been to acknowledge problems, offer the limpest apology and that’s it.

No promise to do better. Get on with it. The fandom and the football will get on with it.

At the Westfalenstadion on Tuesday evening, after the thunderstorms moved on but the electricity stayed right here, enough to power the entire transit grid.

The noise inside the place was utterly deafening as a fraction of this country’s seven million Turkish-Germans assaulted the eardrums, Dortmund’s yellow wall turned blood red as blood pressures spiked. 

In another corner a white island of Georgians gave as damn good as they got.

You thought it couldn’t get louder until Mert Müldür lashed in a luxurious opener. Five frantic minutes later Georges Mikautadze gave the Georgians a moment of history which won’t ever be forgotten.

It was as soul-stirring as Euro 2024 has got so far, with the tantalising promise of more to come — on this night and for the rest of the tournament.

The least Uefa and the transport organisers could do is get everyone home afterwards.