“They told me to do some commentary about current events, like in spite of Virtue and the Muse, our Nemesis - that pesky Strayaroos - will have her dues,” said Sigismund Schiltze and adjusted his feathered green felt cap, “but how can you say something about today and tomorrow without firstly discoursing protractedly on the many yesterdays of time gone by,” he continued and took a long swig from his stein while surveying the stands on the old Baden-Baden-Baden Park Stadia in the eastern Heilige Birgitta Quarter. “So while you might expect a small treatise on Emerson and Emus, I instead invite you to sit down and brace yourself for the beginning of the ending of How The Horkenheimers Ended Up Here.” Herr Schiltze devoured his last bite of a particularly tarty Zitronen-Tarte and smacked his lips in contentment, before continuing: “Call me old fashioned, but when it rains, it pours, and so I suggest we now soldier on and look at Part 13, wherein we witness the birth of The Horkenheimers and their first attempt at adapting to international standards.”
”The decision to establish a national FußBall team and have them compete in the 21st Independent Associations Championship was sudden and produced a most unusual situation within the operational tiers of the SFV, namely a shortage of time. The tournament was to take place somewhere far away in something called Tanirinthia, and only a month or two after the order came down from the top. It quickly became apparent that the making of haste was a necessity, and since the establishing and administering of a national FußBall team did not fit neatly into the existing organizational chart, a new impromptu unit (called Internationales Endeavors, or IE for short) was therefore hastily strung together.
Our old acquaintance Walter Freudlingen was among those commandeered to man the new unit, along with the likes of Jürgen Dammholt from the Abteilung for Rules und Regulations, Willy Brandenburger from the Statistikamt and Angela Mortelz from the Department of Ligaangelegenheiten. They quickly set out to do further research, and immediately encountered challenges.
Dammholt and Freudlingen had been tasked with examining potential IAC peculiarities and soon learned that the game they called Football out there beyond the great mountains significantly differed from what they called FußBall at home beneath the great mountains. The games were no doubt kindred and had many overlapping aspects, but some of the differences were striking.
Firstly, they only had 11 players per team as opposed to the standard 12, and their warning system was less granular and only consisted of a yellow card (a warning) and a red card (leave the pitch!). While the yellow card seemingly did cover many different types of offenses, it was obviously used more leniently and the recipient was not forced to take any sort of timeout, although getting two yellow cards did equal a red one, which was similar to the Seebergundian brown card for repeating FußBall offenders. The ratio of open-play to the referee’s whistle blowing was staggering in favor of the former, and it seemed like the game of Football was primarily played continuously in a flowing session with short breaks of play, as opposed to FußBall’s short and strategically executed bursts of play between extended referee-induced breaks for rule violations. Football games were also to be played in the format of 2x45 minutes, and there was a 15 minute break, which seemed excessive. Above all and most importantly, by all indications it seemed Football was a far more intense, fast-paced and physical game than Seebergundian FußBall.
Someone remarked that this foreign version somewhat resembled descriptions of how FußBall was played in the pre-Wingholter era, and it was decided to seek the aid of Professor Baltazar Oxmaan of Universität Kripkenstein, who was a known historian of athletics with a special interest in the history of FußBall (it was professor Oxmaan that would subsequently define the era, and coin the phrase, of the Vergoldete Age of Seebergundian FußBall). Professor Oxmaan was fairly well-acquainted with Beyond-The-Berge-Football after having interviewed stray foreigners loitering in the Puddingkuchen-Quadrat, and he played a pivotal role in providing required insight and educating the SFV functionaries. The international version of the game was indeed more similar to the older version of FußBall, but there were still considerable differences that IE and the SFV quickly had to get acquainted with, and this also influenced their work with putting together a team.
It was Brandenburger and Mortelz, with their knowledge of the Brinterberger Liga and FußBall statistics, who were in charge of initially assessing possible players. Due to Football’s rapid and physical nature, they sought to map players with sufficient speed and strength. A vital part of this story, however, is that FußBall had been going through a steady decline over the years. Not so much in terms of popularity, which had consequently and reliably been low, but rather in the lacking regrowth of the capital associations.
Several of the old clubs had in practice gone defunct, due to a lack of members willing to administer the activities, and as a consequence the SFV had forced a series of mergers. Old southern clubs BSV Gneis, Felina FußBall and Knackwurst FußBall had been merged into one, named FußBall Club Felina, whereas the western contingent of clubs - Ballclub am Fluss, VfB St. Paulina and BSV Allmannsdorf - had become Ballspielverein St. Paulina, and the northern and eastern clubs - Münsterheim FBV, Dinkelbrot Fußball, BSV Oxwaldstadt, Baden-Baden-Baden FBV and VfB Hügelheim - had all been merged into a big association called Verein für Bewegungsspiele Brinterberg. Staad FBV, BSV Mordorheim and SV Brinterberg were still functional in their original form, but were a long way from their heydays in terms of quality. In general, few youngsters kept on playing beyond the traditional young adolescent years and even though the big association mergers had organizationally concentrated activities and recruitment, it was still the case that several of them at times struggled to field full teams for Liga and Cup games.
So, one problem was that the available player pool for a national team was very much limited, whereas another one was that the way FußBall was played produced players capable of short stints of actions but severely lacking in stamina. Despite these challenges, Brandenburger and Mortelz conducted a thorough assessment of all active capital club players and ended up with a list of 30 or so names. Spontaneously, one would perhaps have expected their «roster» to be dominated by players from Staad, Mordorheim and SV Brinterberg, both because it traditionally would have been prudent to award the honor of representing The Gemeinschaft to players from clubs closely connected with Seebergundian Society, but also because they were undoubtedly the most prominent and choicest FußBall teams in all the land. However, catering to the sensitivities of the old families from the heart of fair Brinterberg was less of a priority now than it had been, and Brandenburger and Mortelz weren’t necessarily after the best FußBall players, but rather players who could plausibly perform well in a game of Football. A group of twenty players - fairly evenly spread out between the remaining capital FußBall associations - were appointed, and the IE contracted Ludvig Adorno to act as their coach. Adorno had previously coached the youth section in Dinkelbrot FußBall, before the club died and was merged into the new VfB Brinterberg, and was seen as a suitably pragmatic traditionalist.
It was Dammholt who suggested the new team be nicknamed The Horkenheimers - a tribute to the great mountains - as a way of fostering a sense of fraternal cohesion amongst the players, and this was universally supported within the SFV. Adorno and his Horkenheimers spent two weeks «learning» to play Football, under the advice of Professor Oxmaan, and then - in a most un-Seebergundian fashion - they travelled abroad. Their experiences in going abroad and encountering that strange world beyond the mountains for the first time is really worthy of being its own story, but let’s not dwell on the finer details and suffice to say The Horkenheimers struggled greatly in adapting to Football and did not fare well against teams like Crpostran and Delte. Das Alte 3-5-3 (which had been modified to a 3-5-2, but retained its name due to historical significance) proved utterly unsuited in going up against such leviathans of international Football.
And that could've easily been the end to the story of The Horkenheimers and The Gemeinschaft competing internationally, because no one enjoys being humiliated like that. However, in their third and final matchday of the 21st IAC, The Horkenheimers came up against an opponent even less talented in the ways of Football, and the hastily assembled Seebergundian team somehow managed to smash The Spartan Dominion with 3 goals to nil. Thereby they managed to secure a future for themselves, but also pave the way for a transformation of Seebergundian FußBall.”
Coquitlam United | 
