Seeing how Darmstadt 98 is playing 2. Liga next season and having just "signed out" of the excellent 3. Liga thread, I looked around and noticed there is no general 2. Liga thread on this board and many of the smaller 2. Liga clubs don't have their own threads, i.e. aren't discussed at all. So here it is. I'm just realizing that I've never followed a 2. Liga club closely before (you know firstly being a HSV fan I roll "traditionell erstklassig" and so on and so forth [chuckles]). I'm only beginning to see that there's all kinds of goodness in store, for instance Friday night and Monday night games. For as long as they can manage to stay in, I will be reporting on Darmstadt 98 news, in particular concerning the new stadium, but also concerning the new players in which the team will invest. I'd love to hear more about the other 2. Liga clubs. Looking at the table, I realize I know a little about Nürnberg, Fürth and Braunschweig, Darmstadt and Leipzig as well as St. Pauli, 1860 and FSV Frankfurt. As for the rest, I have absolutely no clue, don't know the players, the managers or even the names of the stadiums. I'd love to learn more so please feel free to chime in.
Apologies to Buddydog, I just realized there is already s "2nd Division" thread. Didn't mean to step on anyone's toes. But seeing how there was not a single response to that thread for an entire season, perhaps this thread can be the home of the smaller 2. Liga clubs for now. I'm also realizing the irony some people will see, noting my avatar and picture right at the top of a 2. Liga thread. Not yet boys! HSV won't go quietly into the night. Truth be told, I've been dreading a scenario for months in which I'd have to go see HSV at home in Darmstadt next year.
VfL Bochum is a club I quite like for their youth development in the highly competitive Ruhr region. Goretzka is the biggest name recently to emerge from their academy, along with Ostrzolek & Kevin Vogt now all playing well in 1.BL clubs. They have some good talents coming up. Lukas Klostermann is a player to follow, highly prized right back talent who became part of the senior club in the Rückrunde at 17 y/o. Henrik Gulden, Jan Gyamerah, Fabian Holthaus, & Onur Bulut are well rated prospects who have also been promoted and gradually integrated forward. There's also more promising lads in their U19 & U17 youth teams.
People who think there's anything good about the schedule of the 2. Bundesliga are out of touch indeed . The monday night games are one of the worst ideas in German football ever, and the matchday are even more annoyingly dragged out than in the Bundesliga. Just so Sport1 can put more of their shitty highlight shows on air (which are about 90% ads, 10% football, with the worst announcers they could find of course - I bet they have already fired people for being too good. "You kinda don't fit in with our channel's image, you know - people don't want to stab their ears when you announce a game!").
Ah Alex-K, my old friend. Glad to see you here. It's always good to have someone to argue with and secondly, if you hadn't been on this thread this season, it would have likely meant I'd be on this thread posting for two clubs. I have to admit, I like the lilies, but my heart is not deeply in it for them, there's never trepidation, anguish, elation, walking on clouds, even now. I think you can only have feelings like that for one club. I'm just very happy for the lilies right now, period. A great reward for years of hard work and much suffering among the fans. Darmstadt is full of Eintracht fans and they are unnervingly arrogant towards the lilies fans. Especially last season, when Eintracht was doing so well under Veh and it looked like Darmstadt would have to play Regionalliga again (The worst really was Bruchhagen, with his face incessantly on the news telling everyone who would give him the time of day that Eintracht is the only club ever in the history of mankind that managed to qualify for the Europa League with an annual budget of EUR 3.50 without any debts and it's all so unfair because the have to compete with loser clubs like HSV with their pimp daddy billionaire who spends gazillions each month to buy them all the players they want. Yadda, yadda, you can see where I'm coming from, I'm going off on a tangent). Anyway, I can't see myself getting upset over matchdays being dragged out and I kind of like the idea of coming home on Monday nights to watch Sport1. Their announcers can't be worse than Gerd Gottlob who did the commenting on both HSV-Fürth relegation games. I was about ready to murder that guy. There were several occasions during both games where I had to apologize to the wife and kids for my outbursts. There' just one thing I really want to see with my own eyes next season: A win against St. Pauli at the Bölle.
The 2. Liga scheduled is designed to give Sky and Sport1 the most amount of games to fill their programms without clashing with the Bundesliga. For the fans who actually want to attend matches, it really sucks. Travelling from Braunschweig to Munich for an away game on a monday night is kind of hard for many people (and the monday games always involve clubs which would have many travelling fans otherwise, since they don't tend to show Aalen or Sandhausen). The friday and saturday games are equally bad even for the home fans, especially for clubs which draw fans from an entire region. If you work in a regular 9 to 5 job, you'll miss many games. Ten years ago kick-off times were much more reasonable, but then they decided that 2. Liga and Bundesliga should never play at the same time, and that of course the Bundesliga should get all the reasonable kick-off times. What was left for the 2. Liga are games at noon and on monday And even if you follow the league only from a couch, the dragged out matchdays really suck. That's what I miss about the 3. Liga - there almost all games are on at the same time. You don't have to wait for 3 days to know what your nearest rival did all the time, and you don't have to watch 4 days a week if you want to keep up with the other teams in your league.
You're right, I can see how that can really suck if you want to actually go watch as many games as possible and it's true, I did enjoy having all the games played at once in 3. Liga. But like I said, coming home on a Monday night to catch some couch game time is also nice.
One good thing about BL 2: you get to root against RB Leipzig every week. In the US, Dish Network has a Germay package, which shows the Sky Konferenz of BL2 on Sundays. Annoyingly they don't show any of the Friday, Saturday or Monday matches though. I don't get why this is. Instead infomercials and old music cd's are played. Kind of strange. I wish they'd at least add one more BL2 day of matches. Does anyone know when the BL2 fixtures list will be released?
This season Zweite Bundesliga starts on August 1st (Friday), three weeks before the Bundesliga. I don't know an exact date for the fixtures, but the procedure is that the licensing must be done (end of May). Then the fixture schedule is computed, the plans are handed out to the BL clubs, maybe a reoptimization is needed. So one can expect that the fixtures are released in mid of June (fixtures of the weekends) and the detailed information (day and kick-off time) are made public about one month before the match days. Btw: The last two seasons the (not-detailled) fixtures for the Bundesliga were presented in the 3rd week of June.
Did some research on the other promoted club, 1.FC Heidenheim. Quite an interesting story themselves. Originally founded in 1846. A full decade ago (2003-04) they were in the 5th tier Verbandsliga Württemberg and won promotion into the 4th tier Oberliga Baden-Württemberg. From there it took them 5 seasons and another step promotion along the way to reach the 3.Liga. 5 more seasons later they won the 3rd division title and now they're here in the 2.Liga. Manager Frank Schmidt has lead the club since 2007 guiding them through several promotions along the way.
The city has for its size (less than 50000 inhabitants) a lot of economic power. Voith (engineering company) and Hartmann (medicine) are companies with over one billion € turnover/year and Euromicron (glass fibre) and the Mayer group (engineering) are also well known. I was surprised about the clubs budget (second largest in 3. liga behind Red Bull Leipzig, äh sry Rasenballsport), but after the short research it is clear, Heidenheim is a engineering city and the club managed to active the above mentioned companies as sponsors.
Heidenheim is the most likeable of the recent wave of Souther German small town clubs (Hoffenheim, Aalen, Sandhausen, Großaspach...) by far. they have a likeable enough fanbase and did good work in steadily improving the club step by step.
That's how I see it, too. They are also starting to build a decent fanbase, an average home game attendance of more than 9,000 last season, that's not much less than established clubs like Cottbus, Fürth and Paderborn. Speaking of those Southern small town clubs, I must say that Hoffenheim has won some respect back from me. Their academy really appears to be doing a solid job and I was impressed at the way they stabilized their game over the last season without simply spending a lot of cash on new players. Darmstadt news: There's still no news on the state contribution for the new stadium, but barring them finding any WWII bombs, it looks like they will be able to finish the necessary refurbishments in order to play the entire next season at the Bölle. Until last week it still looked like they may have to use the FSV Frankfurt stadium. After waving their long-time goalkeeper Jan Zimmermann good-bye after his departure for Heidenheim (no hard feelings among the fans, just gratitude for his solid performance), Darmstadt signed Christian Wetklo as new goalie yesterday. Wetklo is 34 years old and played 114 1. BL games for Mainz over the past couple of years. I always thought he was a pretty good goalie and am very pleased with the signing. Oh yeah and then there's this (shameless I know):
The State of Hesse finally came through: EUR 10.5 million. The Bölle will be redone for a total amount of EUR 27, in accordance with the current planning, construction will begin next spring and the new stadium could be completed in the summer of 2016. Not bad! http://www.echo-online.de/sport/svd...oellenfalltorstadions-steht;art1168,5128784,F
The DFL announced the presentation of the schedule for BL1 and BL2. They will be presented on Tuesday. http://www.bundesliga.de/de/liga/news/2013/spannung-steigt--neue-spielplaene-am-24--juni.php
Heidenheim and Aalen have been actively recruiting players from others' youth and reserve teams to further boost their rosters. Will be interesting to see how they transition together onto the 2.BL level. Darmstadt has signed former Werder youth, defensive midfielder Tobias Kempe from Dynamo Dresden.
After losing many of their core players in relegation, Nürnberg has been rebuilding their team with a group of young players. The signings made so far should help FCN stay competitive in the 2.Liga. Danny Blum from Sandhausen is a fast player with nice skill. If he stays healthy I can see him having a good season for them. I like the addition of Willi Evseev, Mike Ott, and Alessandro Schöpf as young midfield options. Sylvestr is a good striker at the 2.Liga level. Bringing in Niclas Füllkrug will also be a huge boost to their attack. They've added a couple defensive reinforcements from other leagues. Even Hovland from Molde FK and Dave Bulthuis from FC Utrecht will provide them good defensive coverage. Loaning in left back, Cristian Ramirez from Düsseldorf gives them even more depth. The key player to build around is Niklas Stark, he'll continue to grow and can be a centre piece for the club. The upcoming season can also be an opportunity to further integrate more youth players. Other notable transfer news: Braunschweig have signed Swiss U21 CB. Saulo Decarli, and winger Hendrick Zuck on loan from Freiburg. Zuck played well couple seasons ago with Kaiserslautern, so hopefully he can regain that form. Fürth are building again for another strong season and promotion fight. They've have brought in Johannes Wurtz from Werder, Zhi Gin Lam from HSV, and more. Philipp Hofmann at Kaiserslautern, and Jonas Meffert & Philipp Max to Karlsruhe are other young players to watch after transfers to their new clubs.
US national player (not in the WC roster) Terence Boyd (23) joins RB Leipzig from Rapid Vienna. Transfer fee 2 million (transfermarkt.de). Clever move by Red Bull, the move weakens a rival of RB Salzburg and provides RBL a quality footballer.
Red Bull further weakened Rapid Wien by signing Marcel Sabitzer, their top young talent, and one of the best Austrian talents. Official contract is with their Leipzig location, but will be loaned to Salzburg for the season.
New kits for 14/15 season: Greuther Fürth Home 1860 Munich Home/Away Karlsruhe 120th Anniversary Home
I'm going to be in Germany for Bundesliga II matchday 7. If I went to the stadium for 2 tickets an hour prior to kick-off do you think I'd have trouble seeing any of these: Bochum home vs. Fortuna Dusseldorf or Kaiserslautern home vs. Union Berlin
Based on last seasons attendences the matches are much likely not sold out: Oct 2013: Bochum - Düsseldorf 16563/29299 Nov 3013: Kaiserslautern - Union 33284/49,780 But I would take a look on the clubs homepages. Normally the inform about expected attendances a few days before the matches.
Probably not for Kaiserslautern, but you never know. The lines may be bad and you have to walk up the hill to the stadium. Get it earlier if you can, but this definitely is the experience you are looking for.