Sports club

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This article or paragraph presents the situation in Germany . Help us to describe the situation in other countries.

Sports club and sports community are redirects to this article. For the special meanings in the GDR see Sportclub (DDR) and Sportgemeinschaft (DDR) , for an NDR television program see Sportclub (television program) .

A sports club , sports association , sports club or sports club is an association whose aim is to give people enthusiastic about sports access to areas (e.g. soccer fields or sports halls or gyms ) and sports equipment (e.g. parallel bars and horizontal bars in gymnastics ) and To enable like-minded people. Sports clubs are organized in sports associations according to the types of sport offered . These offer the clubs participation in organized competitions in the form of tournaments or league operations .

In Germany there are over 90,000 sports clubs of which around 30% of German citizens are members (as of 2016).

Creation of sports clubs

The oldest sports clubs in Germany are the shooting clubs . The emergence of sports clubs is connected with the club formation that spread at the beginning of the 19th century , especially of patriotic gymnastics and physical exercise clubs . In Napoleonically occupied Germany, under the intellectual paternity of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn , young men with a national orientation gathered for exercises in "gymnastics clubs" that were sociable on the outside and subversive-paramilitary in character.

The oldest (still existing) gymnastics club in Germany is, according to the German Gymnastics Federation, the gymnastics and sports club TSV 1814 Friedland from Mecklenburg .

Sports clubs in the GDR

In GDR sport , company sports associations (BSG) and university sports associations (HSG) fulfilled the function of sports clubs in the popular sports sector. For the individual sports, the sports communities are divided into sections. The respective sponsoring companies were responsible for the financing of their sports communities. Membership in a company sports community was not tied to an activity in the associated sponsoring company, but could be chosen freely according to the range of sports.

The competitive sport was usually based in the sports clubs (SC). Membership in a sports club could only be obtained on the basis of delegations, which were strictly bound to the performance principle in the cadre system of GDR sports. It was not possible for people involved in sports to join sports clubs at their own request.

Fan culture

While fans of national teams usually stand by "their" team out of patriotism , the reason or the cause for the enthusiasm of fans of sports clubs must be viewed more individually. Often friends or relatives with the same passion are the reason for choosing a club, often you become a fan of the club in your region of birth or your place of residence, but there are numerous reasons why you have chosen "your" club. The English writer Nick Hornby put it this way: "Few of us chose our clubs, they were simply given to us."

See also

• List of sports club abbreviations
• List of the sports clubs with the largest number of members

Web links

Wiktionary: Sports club  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Statistisches Jahrbuch 2017 , Statistisches Bundesamt, p. 219 (PDF; 562 kB), accessed on July 22, 2018.
2. ^ Sports clubs - a German success story , Goethe-Institut e. V., accessed on July 22, 2018.
3. ↑ Arnd Krüger , John McClelland (ed.): The beginnings of modern sports in the Renaissance . Arena, London 1984.
4. ↑ A visit to the oldest sports club in Germany , Boris Herrmann in: Süddeutsche Zeitung No. 3 from 4./5./6. January 2014, p. 33.