FC St Pauli: A German football club that combats racism and xenophobia as part of its identity
In 2013/14, when West African migrants arrived in Hamburg from the Italian island of Lampedusa, FC St Pauli established FC Lampedusa-Hamburg, a club for displaced footballers and their fans
By The Immigrant Times (IMT)
At the Hamburg-based football club FC St. Pauli, music and social commitment matter as much to players and fans as football. The club's iconic skull-and-crossbones (Totenkopf) symbol represents its progressive, anti-establishment, working-class identity.
September 2026: When Germany’s new national football coach, and former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp, presented his first squad in September 2026, he used the occasion to talk about more than football.
Days after the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party made major gains in the state elections in eastern Germany, Klopp called for what he described as 'positive patriotism '. Germans, he said, should not leave national pride to 'the wrong people'. He wanted people to be able to wave the German flag without its being associated with the far right.
Klopp’s definition of belonging was broad. People should appreciate the good fortune of having been born, grown up or moved to Germany, he said, adding that it was possible to be proud of being German while remaining “open and diverse.
In German football, few clubs have made the idea of an open society as central to their identity as FC St Pauli. Based in Hamburg and currently playing in Germany’s second division, St Pauli has won few major honours. It has moved repeatedly between divisions and was relegated from the Bundesliga at the end of the 2025/26 season.
Yet its brown-and-white colours and skull-and-crossbones flag are recognised far beyond Germany. The club has more than 50,000 members and supporters across numerous countries. Its international reputation rests as much on what happens around the football pitch as on its results on it.
St Pauli identifies with opposition to racism, antisemitism, fascism, sexism and homophobia. Supporters display political banners inside the Millerntor Stadium, while the club has incorporated social and anti-discrimination policies into its organisation. It also has a football team for refugees and migrants.
But this identity did not exist from the club’s inception. It emerged largely from changes in its supporter culture during the 1980s and 1990s, and from conflicts over racism and the far right that also affected St Pauli.
St Pauli in the Nazi era
St Pauli’s reputation sometimes creates the impression that the club has always embodied the political values it holds today. Its history is more complicated. Research by the FC St Pauli Museum and German public broadcaster NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk) has examined the club’s record during the Nazi period from 1933 to 1945 and its later struggles to confront that history.
The Jewish footballer Selig Cahn, who played for St Pauli in the 1930s, was deported with his family to Auschwitz in 1942 and murdered. Wilhelm Koch, a former player who later became a powerful club president, joined the Nazi Party in 1937. The club later named its stadium after him. It was not until 1997, after Koch’s Nazi Party membership became more widely known, that members voted to remove his name and restore the name Millerntor-Stadion.
Struggling with racism in the post-War era
Racism did not disappear from St Pauli immediately after World War II. The club signed Guy Acolatse from Togo in 1963. He became one of the first Black African footballers to play professionally in Germany. Yet decades later, Black visiting players could still face racist abuse at the St Pauli Millerntor stadium.
NDR’s investigation recorded supporters making monkey noises at Souleymane Sané, the Senegalese international and father of German international Leroy Sané, around 1989/90. Black players were also subjected to racist abuse elsewhere in German football. Far-right supporters carrying nationalist flags attended St Pauli matches.
In 1991, a Turkish supporter who responded to chants of 'Foreigners out' by shouting 'Nazis out' was attacked and seriously injured. Other spectators failed to intervene. The incident became part of the process through which supporters organised against racist and far-right groups at the Millerntor.
A new generation of club supporters brought changes
St Pauli’s absolute refusal to accommodate far-right sentiment did not stem from enlightened executive leadership or federation directives. It was forged in the 1980s through street battles, political squatting, and physical clashes on the terraces.
Throughout that decade, football grounds across West Germany were fertile recruiting grounds for neo-fascist street gangs and violent nationalist boneheads. In Hamburg, far-right elements had established a suffocating presence on the terraces of the neighbouring Bundesliga side Hamburger SV.
At the same time, a severe urban housing crisis along the Elbe led to the mass occupation of derelict riverside tenements on Hafenstraße. The occupied tenements quickly became a nerve centre for the autonomous left, housing artists, trade unionists, anti-nuclear organisers, and squatter collectives.
As these residents began drifting up the hill to attend matches at the rundown Millerntor, they encountered an unexceptional lower-league club, whose modest crowds were increasingly harassed by violent right-wing skinheads. Rather than abandoning the ground, the Hafenstraße contingent organised.
The territorial struggle for the Millerntor was direct and physical. Through disciplined collective presence, mutual defence, and vocal mobilisation, anti-fascist supporters systematically pushed organised neo-Nazi factions off the terraces.
During this campaign of reclamation, supporters adopted an unofficial talisman: the Totenkopf (skull and crossbones). Picked up by chance at a local market stall in the Reeperbahn's red-light district, the pirate flag became a symbol of maritime rebellion, an emblem for impoverished dock workers, outsiders, and harbour outcasts confronting wealthy merchant galleons.
By 1991, St Pauli had become the first professional football club in Germany to formally codify a ban on fascist symbols, nationalist banners, and xenophobic chanting in its stadium regulations. In 2009, the club went further, incorporating the Leitlinien (Guiding Principles) into its formal constitution. The document mandates that human dignity, mutual respect, and active opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia take absolute precedence over sporting ambition or commercial profit.
FC St Pauli forms the football club FC Lampedusa-Hamburg
In the wake of the 2013 Mediterranean migration crisis, when hundreds of West African asylum seekers reached Hamburg after surviving crossings to the Italian island of Lampedusa and subsequent displacement across southern Europe, Hamburg's municipal government imposed strict policing measures, including street checks and the threat of deportation.
St Pauli supporters responded with immediate, direct action, opening the Millerntor-Stadion to provide emergency shelter, clothing distribution centres, and legal advisory clinics.
Yet the most radical intervention was athletic: the creation of FC Lampedusa Hamburg, an independent football club established by and for displaced migrants and fully backed by St Pauli’s infrastructure.
The initiative immediately ran into the institutional rigidity of the official sports administration. When FC Lampedusa sought to register players for competitive league fixtures, the Hamburg Football Association (HFV) erected an insurmountable wall of red tape.
The regional federation insisted on strict documentation: national passports, formal birth certificates, and permanent residency papers, documents that refugees fleeing conflict zones or administrative limbo could not produce.
Rather than accepting the administrative exclusion of undocumented footballers, St Pauli and the players mounted a sustained political campaign. The club opened its training complexes to the squad, provided coaching staff, and organised high-profile, unsanctioned 'solidarity friendlies' that drew thousands of spectators and attracted extensive media attention. These matches served as public protests against discriminatory eligibility statutes, exposing how ordinary sports bureaucracies replicate state exclusion.
FC Lampedusa was never reduced to a short-term public relations exercise. It remains an enduring institution in Hamburg’s sporting landscape, a self-governed space where displaced individuals assert their legal right to public presence, bodily autonomy, and participation in the sporting community.
This institutional posture was decisively reinforced in 2019. When Turkish international midfielder Cenk Şahin posted on social media endorsing a cross-border military offensive against Kurdish-held territories in northern Syria, fan uproar was immediate.
Rejecting the argument that an employee’s external political declarations should be insulated from workplace accountability, the club released him from his contract. In an official statement, the board affirmed that his public support for military aggression directly violated the club’s legally binding Leitlinien.
St Pauli is owned by its fans and supporters
St Pauli’s ability to take uncompromising political and humanitarian stances is underpinned by an operational structure that is virtually extinct at the highest levels of global football: democratic, cooperative ownership.
Across Europe, elite clubs have increasingly succumbed to private equity syndicates, multi-club ownership groups, and sovereign wealth funds, all of which enforce sterile political neutrality to preserve global sponsorships.
In contrast, St Pauli remains an eingetragener Verein (e.V.), a non-profit, member-run registered association. The club belongs exclusively to its roughly 40,000 registered members, and the annual General Assembly (Mitgliederversammlung) operates on a strict 'one member, one vote' basis.
While the German first-division Bundesliga’s '50+1' rule guarantees that club members retain nominal majority control across German professional football, many legacy clubs have diluted this spirit. They have spun off their professional football divisions into commercial corporations and auctioned minority equity stakes to automotive conglomerates and financial consortia.
St Pauli has repeatedly rejected corporate dilution. When sporting relegation necessitated structural funding for stadium upgrades, the club bypassed commercial debt markets and private investors, opting instead to launch the Football Cooperative St Pauli 2024 eG.
This fan-owned cooperative allows rank-and-file supporters, neighbourhood organisations, and small businesses to buy cooperative shares in the Millerntor-Stadion itself. By placing the stadium’s physical infrastructure into a communal cooperative trust, the club legally insulated its grounds from corporate naming-rights sales, commercial leverage, and outside takeovers.
This democratic architecture directly empowers its immigrant and anti-racist initiatives. When executive management opened stadium facilities to arriving migrants or endorsed boycotts of problematic corporate sponsors, they did so without fear of shareholder revolts or corporate litigation.
The club's ultimate owners are the supporters volunteering in community kitchens and filling the stands. Democratic accountability transformed social solidarity from a discretionary expense into a core operational duty.
St Pauli's faces sporting and political rivals
Following their relegation from the Bundesliga at the close of the 2025/26 campaign, the club’s return to the 2. Bundesliga has thrust it back into direct territorial conflict with regions where social dislocation has fostered right-wing reaction.
This dynamic is starkly illustrated in matches against eastern German clubs such as FC Hansa Rostock and FC Energie Cottbus. The sociological roots of this rivalry trace directly to the fallout from German reunification in 1990.
The rapid dismantling of the East German industrial core led to mass unemployment, severe youth depopulation, and civic abandonment across many former GDR (German Democratic Republic) territories. In that institutional void, organised far-right movements deliberately targeted football terraces, cultivating a militant youth subculture rooted in grievance, anti-migrant hostility, and regional resentment.
In Rostock, that radicalisation reached a historical nadir during the August 1992 pogrom in the Lichtenhagen district, when a xenophobic mob besieged an asylum reception centre while thousands of local bystanders looked on and applauded. Elements of that ultra-nationalist subculture entrenched themselves within sections of Rostock’s terrace.
Consequently, matches between St Pauli and Hansa Rostock, often dubbed the 'Political Derby' of German football, require extensive security mobilisations. When St Pauli travels to these grounds, the fixtures become ideological flashpoints. The away terraces, packed with supporters chanting "Ganz Hamburg hasst die AfD" (All Hamburg hates the AfD), face hostile barrages of far-right provocation, ranging from overt xenophobic abuse to inflammatory banners referencing historical violence against immigrants.
Yet rather than softening their stance to de-escalate tensions, St Pauli’s supporters and administration have intensified their civic resistance. In September 2026, as regional state election results confirmed decisive AfD breakthroughs in the East, the club formally displayed anti-extremism campaign banners along its stadium perimeter boards. The message was explicit: neutrality in the face of far-right normalisation amounts to complicity.
FC St Pauli, an international role model for diversity and solidarity in football
Yet for all its ethical clarity, St Pauli cannot operate outside the predatory financial mechanics of professional football. The club faces an inescapable paradox: how to maintain an anti-capitalist, grassroots identity while competing in a multi-billion-euro entertainment industry.
The sporting reality is precarious. After their promotion to the top flight in 2024, St Pauli faced the stark financial disparity between mid-sized, member-run clubs and corporate-backed giants. Their subsequent relegation in May 2026 underscored the harsh structural limits imposed on clubs that refuse external equity injections.
At the same time, the global proliferation of the Totenkopf emblem has fuelled a multi-million-euro merchandising apparatus. St Pauli jerseys and pirate banners are sold in independent boutiques from London and Tokyo to Melbourne and São Paulo.
This commodification draws steady internal criticism from the club’s core ultras, notably the Ultrà Sankt Pauli (USP). Ultra representatives routinely warn against the risks of 'radical chic', the danger that a genuine working-class struggle against fascism is reduced to a lifestyle fashion brand consumed by international tourists with no ties to Hamburg’s street politics.
Management and supporter activists contend, however, that this international diaspora has genuine political utility. Worldwide, official St Pauli fan clubs function not merely as sports-viewing groups but as mutual-aid and activist outposts.
From Glasgow to Athens and New York, local fan chapters organise immigrant-solidarity drives, raise funds for search-and-rescue vessels operating in the Mediterranean, and support neighbourhood anti-racist coalitions.
Furthermore, the St Pauli model has inspired a wave of fan-owned, politically engaged clubs across Europe, including Clapton CFC in east London, Whitehawk FC in Brighton, and supporter-driven movements at Rayo Vallecano in Madrid. The club’s internationalisation has built a transnational network of resistance to the corporatisation of sport and the normalisation of border violence.
INFO BOX: FC ST PAULI
Founded: 15 May 1910
Ground: Millerntor-Stadion, Hamburg (Capacity: 30,000)
Ownership & governance: 100% member-owned registered association (eingetragener Verein / e.V.) operating under a democratic "one member, one vote" framework; stadium infrastructure is safeguarded by a supporter-owned cooperative (Football Cooperative St Pauli 2024 eG), which prevents institutional corporate buyouts and private equity investment.
Colours & symbolism: Brown and white; globally recognised by the unofficial Totenkopf (skull and crossbones), introduced by squatter movements in the late 1980s.
League status: 2. Bundesliga (Relegated following the 2025/26 Bundesliga season).
Milestones in terrace activism:
1980s: Left-wing squatters from nearby Hafenstraße organise on the terraces, driving violent neo-fascist factions off the ground.
1991: Becomes the first German professional club to officially bar nationalist and racist propaganda within stadium regulations.
2002: Defeated world champions Bayern Munich 2–1 while sitting at the bottom of the Bundesliga, earning the moniker "Weltpokalsiegerbesieger" (World Club Champion Beaters).
2009: Ratifies the Leitlinien (Guiding Principles) into official club statutes, providing legal protection for human rights, diversity, and anti-discrimination.
2013–Present: Sheltered Mediterranean asylum seekers within the stadium and supported the creation of FC Lampedusa, an autonomous, club-supported football team for refugees.
Further reading from The Immigrant Times: Germany's immigrant footballers || France's immigrant footballers || England's immigrant footballers || Belgium's immigrant footballers ||
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