A phone-free Yellow Wall: are Dortmund urging fans to be present or policing them?

By all appearances, things on the Yellow Wall seemed as they always had been. The stadium announcer hollered out the first names of Borussia Dortmund’s starting lineup and the supporters responded with their last names, tens of thousands of voices bellowing as one. Dozens of black and yellow flags waved over Europe’s largest standing terrace, a mass of faces fixed on the field beneath them.

And then Signal Iduna Park, sold out with 81,365 fans, roared when Max Beier’s lone goal led Dortmund to victory over Eintracht Frankfurt last Saturday, putting the home side even on points with Bayern Munich atop the Bundesliga standings.

Yet, apparently, a crisis of a sort has been churning just below the surface of what is, by broad consensus, Europe’s best home support.

On Friday, Dortmund had announced a kind of bribery scheme. A rewards program is probably a kinder way of putting it. Fans who stayed off their phones during the bout with Eintracht had the chance to win signed jerseys and earn gift cards to the club’s merchandise store. If they activated a so-called “fan mode” on the club’s app – a name so phenomenally passive-aggressive you can only applaud whoever came up with it – the club could count who unlocked their phones the fewest times during the game. For every minute the fans left their phones alone, they got points.

Dortmund are not the only German team to pick a fight with phones.

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Second-division clubs Hertha Berlin and Dynamo Dresden have banned commercial influencer-style videos in their stadiums altogether, fearing for both the integrity of the TV rights they sell and the experience of their fans. Dortmund, likewise, appear motivated by the incursion of influencers, who are siphoning off and monetizing footage of the famous match-day experience and growing into a nuisance for regulars.

This problem has also afflicted the tennis majors. The US Open now resembles an influencer convention more than it does a tennis tournament. When the US Tennis Association credentialed more than 100 content creators this year, the influencers grew so disruptive that a match was stopped when a chair umpire had to ask them to turn off a ring light. Wimbledon has refused to credential influencers for just this reason, which doesn’t stop them from getting in with regular tickets or through sponsors.

Dortmund’s attempt at shaping fan behavior, however, goes further than warding off the cultural content parasites. This please-stop-holding-up-your-phones-and-just-live-in-the-present plea raises quasi-existential questions about sport and its consumption.

“Over 81,000 people in the stadium, singing, cheering, and holding their breath together: this here and now is irreplaceable,” Dortmund chief executive Carsten Cramer said. “And that’s exactly what we’re putting front and center together.”

“Anyone at a soccer game should experience the moment and the emotions – not just a cell phone screen,” added Marcel de Groot, the chief executive of Vodafone Germany, both a cellphone service provider and a Dortmund sponsor. “Let’s leave our smartphones in our pockets more often at the stadium and instead focus on what’s happening on the field and in the stands.”

These were statements delivered with unshakeable confidence in their righteousness, yet there is evidence to suggest this simply isn’t how some fans want to behave at stadiums.

Which begs the question: can, and should, professional sports teams get to dictate how their ticket-buying fans experience their games? It’s surely a question that’s crossed the mind of all the musicians who now perform to a sea of cell phones, their flashlights on, obscuring the faces in the crowd. Did their fans buy the right to experience the concert as they please? Or does this objectify the musicians and diminish the performance, somehow?

It goes back to the question of whether sport is entertainment, and whether its consumers get to sit back and let the proceedings and the attendant stimuli wash over them. Or whether they are something else entirely: active participants in the games they attend. If that is so, then fandom amounts to a parasocial relationship conferring membership to a community with attendant behavioral expectations.

What are the responsibilities of the ticketholder? Do teams get to purity-test their supporters? What do fans owe their teams? Is live soccer just content? A day out, not unlike going to the movies or a museum, where nobody expects total focus and for you to cheer on the thing you’re looking at? Is it heresy to even suggest this?

The latter tends to be the view, or at least the vibe, in most American sports leagues where fans are often less engaged, told by an announcer and a jumbo screen when and what to clap or stomp or chant. This has always contrasted with the feel of global football, where the folklore is usually organic, sparked and dictated by the fans themselves. It’s why all of those pre-game and half-time concerts at the World Cup final rankled, drowning out the thrum of the throaty Argentina fans.

It feels both instructive and fitting that this debate broke out at Dortmund. The Bundesliga’s rules on safeguarding fan majority ownership of very nearly every club have preserved the league as a kind of supporters’ paradise, with relatively cheap tickets and policies that put fans first. Dortmund, for their part, have been held up for years as a paradigm for their following – thus attracting the influencers, of course.

The latter will be dealt with, it seems. In an age when soccer clubs are essentially production houses who also field company teams, it always seemed inevitable that these interlopers would be expelled from the premises. The fans, however, are not so easily corrected on behavior their teams have deemed undesirable. And they will vote with their credit cards.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.