UEFA Champions League: Celtic v RB Leipzig (Tuesday, 8pm, live on TNT Sports)
WHEN RB Leipzig first won promotion to the Bundesliga, the approach of one newspaper in Berlin was indicative of how their ascent was viewed.
In their league tables, the Berliner Kurier would replace Leipzig’s name with the word Dosenverkauf, which translates as ‘can sellers’.
That was, and is, how they are seen by so much of the rest of Germany.
It is not about their ascent nor their success, but the manner of it.
Sporting fairytales are a very distinctive shade of green in the modern day. A financial transplant is the essential component that links not even the Man Citys of the world but the Leicester Citys too.
Leicester were still able to capture hearts and minds when they won their Premier League title because it wasn’t all about splashing cash.
But that will never be said about Leipzig.
The reaction to Jurgen Klopp’s appointment as Red Bull’s new global head of soccer let the world know that feelings towards the east German club have not cooled in the slightest.
On Saturday, Borussia Dortmund welcomed RasenBallsport Leipzig (their official name that barely translates in a logical context, allowing them to keep RB in the name of the club but circumvent the rules around it).
More than anyone and anywhere else, the Westfalenstadion despises everything about Red Bull’s place in their market.
Dortmund had lost their last three games; Leipzig were unbeaten in the league in 19.
The game finished 2-1 to Dortmund.
Leipzig’s closest brush with a Bundesliga title was in 2021. Hopes were already fading but Dortmund took great delight in putting the final nail in them with a 3-2 win.
Klopp’s ideals matched those the Dortmund supporters the same way he had in Liverpool, central to why those relationships were not only hugely successful but largely immune to the fickleness of your average connection between manager and supporter.
The socialist political views aligned, as they would in many ways with those of Celtic’s passionate support base.
Glasgow’s green and white would have no reason to hate Leipzig, but nor are they likely to find a reason to love them.
Ever since the club was formed in May 2009, they’ve faced protest after protest.
Dortmund’s opposition to Leipzig has been the most vocal and sustained since abstaining from their first Bundesliga visit to Leipzig in favour of watching the club’s youth team at home and listening in on the radio.
Things went too far in 2017. Violence broke out after 400 Dortmund ultras gathered and attacked Red Bull supporters.
Things have been more restrained ever since but Leipzig themselves wouldn’t mistake it for a cooling-off.
Union Berlin have also been at the forefront, holding a 15-minute silent protest at the start of one meeting and coming to the Red Bull Arena for another dressed all in black, carrying coffins and flags and a banner that read ‘In Leipzig Stirbt der Fußball’ (football dies in Leipzig).
In late 2016, Dynamo Dresden fans threw a severed bull’s head on to the pitch.
Bayern Munich fans unveiled a banner that succinctly said ‘F*** RB’.
Safe to say they’ve got the point at this stage.
Klopp himself has become the target in recent weeks.
Protests in his direction were more tempered and respectful but still designed to make their point and let him know that he had hurt those that loved him.
“Have you forgotten everything we made you become?” read a banner held by Mainz fans after the news. He had spent 18 years there as player and coach.
Klopp had signed Naby Keita and Takumi Minamino from Red Bull clubs and Sadio Mane via the long route through Southampton when he was with Liverpool and, according to Karan Tejwani’s book ‘Wings of Change’ on the club’s reformation, had told RB staff in 2019 of his admiration towards the young talent they were producing.
Their policy of developing and promoting youth is the counter-charge to the dislike of their way of doing things.
In Leipzig as in Salzburg, they spent money but they tried to be smart with it.
There are elements of what they do to admire, not least that they try to play expansive football.
Klopp’s role will be to emulate the success of Ralf Rangnick, who oversaw the early growth of the Red Bull project across Salzburg, New York and Leipzig.
He went on to briefly manage Manchester United as an interim, where his most notable achievement was succinctly diagnosing in a press conference the illnesses that were causing untold internal damage.
There are parts of RB Leipzig do that could be seen as palatable, even admirable in different circumstances.
As a business, they’ve been successful in pretty much everything they’ve ever done, right from redefining the drinks market itself upon the company’s inception.
But the abruptness of their way of doing things hasn’t made things any easier.
When the company took over in Salzburg, not only did they change the club’s colours to their own branded white, red and yellow, but they actively dissuaded fans from bringing anything coloured purple to games.
They had tried in Germany to start further up the chain but were knocked back and ended up purchasing a fifth-tier club, SSV Markranstädt.
First they circumvented the rules around the club’s name and then its structure, which was the big issue for opposition teams.
They’ve long abided by the 50+1 model in Germany, where fans own a majority of the club and have autonomy over decision-making around things like ticket prices.
Red Bull got around it by splitting the structure of their club up in a very different way.
Instead of having thousands of members with voting rights, as other clubs do, they have just 17, most of whom are directly linked to Red Bull.
They arrive in Glasgow beneath a cloud after one of their supporters was caught making an illegal Nazi salute at St Pauli fans during a cup game last Tuesday night.
Incidents like that will not speed up the endearment process.
And yet for the sheer scale of the project’s unpopularity, it has crept its way into life in the city.
Eight years after the club was formed, the redeveloped Zentralstadion sold out its 42,000 seats as RB Leipzig hosted Bayern Munich in a midweek cup game that the hosts lost on a penalty shootout.
The fact was that they’d quietly grown a support base.
A large part of that was east Germany’s longing for a footballing superpower of its own.
While football in the country had its roots there, a lot of the strength had migrated west long before the Berlin Wall came down.
Traditionalists in Leipzig retain allegiance to Chemie or Lokomotiv Leipzig, who have their own rivalry steeped in political and cultural difference.
They’ve both been about since the mid-1960s, created three years apart out of the ruins of disbanded clubs in what was then the communist state.
RB Leipzig are based in the same state of Saxony as Chemie, but it’s the latter who wear the region’s traditional green and white colours.
Having struggled first off the back of World War II after which its role as an important financial centre collapsed, and then the reunification of Germany that saw most of its industrial jobs disappear, it is a city redefining itself and finding its place.
Companies like Amazon, BMW and Porsche have created bases there in recent years that have brought thousands of new jobs to the area.
RasenBallsport Leipzig have a part they can play in that future, a space they can occupy in the city’s growth.
But there will never be room in the beating heart of German football for them.
For however long they exist, whether they thrive or not, all that they are and represent will be despised in their home land.
