- [Seth] Something that I didn't really understand
growing up in the United States
is that there are multiple ways to determine
the best team in a league of multiple teams.
- [Steven] Right, just instead of having an actual playoff.
- [Seth] Exactly.
In the US, basically every major league
has a regular season, which feeds into a tournament.
And the team that wins the tournament is the champion.
- [Steven] That's the way that American god
told us to do it, right?
- [Seth] Right.
- We put a lot of faith in a second smaller season
that isn't really reflective of what the actual season was.
And we're all okay with that.
- Yeah, I kind of love how arbitrary and unfair that is
'cause that's how life is.
In many European soccer leagues,
they do something different,
where champion of the league is obviously just the best team
at the end of the season, you know?
So if you have a perfect record like the Patriots
some years ago, they would be the champion.
They also play a knockout style tournament.
But instead of tacking that on at the end of the season,
they play those games intermittently throughout the season.
- So it's two separate things occurring simultaneously
and yet, both could yield like an arguable champion.
I feel like a lot of this is patronizing back
to the United States.
Like, "We're gonna take your postseason format,
we're just gonna do it on the side as an exhibition
to show you how silly all of this is."
- Yeah, yeah.
- Which I don't like at all.
- So this creates,
like you mentioned a very important situation
where there are sort of two parallel timelines.
One team composed of one roster of players
will play some league games,
Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday,
on Friday, they'll play what is basically a playoff game.
And then they'll go right back
to playing regular season games.
- All right, busy week, that's fine though.
- Yeah, it's probably a little less dense
than I'm describing it.
But this becomes an issue because no matter what,
even if you have two separate competitions going on
simultaneously interwoven,
time moves linearly and events accrue: injuries,
penalties, things like that.
You need to work that into your system
or you get in trouble.
So, relevant:
In the 1990-1991 Bundesliga season,
so German football. Like other competitions,
they were having their little Bundesliga season
and they were having the DFB-Pokal, the cup,
the tournament that they play simultaneously.
For the team in Cologne, Germany, FC Köln,
which is hard to say for an English speaker,
so we're gonna say Cologne from here on out,
a player by the name of Frank Ordenewitz, nickname Otze,
had accrued a bunch of yellow cards in the tournament play.
So in these intermittent playoff games.
- Okay.
- And late in the 1991 season,
had accrued enough yellow cards
that he was about to trigger a rule,
wherein if you have too many yellow cards
in the tournament play,
you are then suspended for the next tournament game.
- That makes sense so far.
Yeah, that makes total sense
- Got it, okay.
So in the semifinal of this tournament,
he realizes, "Oh shit, I've racked up too many yellow cards.
I'm going to be suspended for the final,
which is like a month in the future."
- [Steven] Okay.
- [Seth] However, in between the semi-final
and the tournament final
are a bunch of regular Bundesliga league games.
And if you get a red card, no matter the competition,
you are suspended for the next game on your team's schedule.
- Makes sense.
- Do you see where this is going?
- Yeah, we are running a current season.
Okay, all right.
- So he goes to his coach and says,
"Hey man, if I just get myself booted from this game,
then I can just serve my suspension later this week
or next week, instead of being suspended
for this really exciting tournament final."
And his coach, very famously in what has become a meme says
in his local German dialect, "Do it, Otze."
- So all involved are basically aware
that they are manipulating the system,
they are gaming the system.
As soon as this idea's seized upon,
no one pauses, like there's no dissenting voice here.
They're just like absolutely break the system.
- As far as I can understand,
that's basically the conversation of like,
"Listen, there's a loophole.
Let's exploit it."
And I think it's important that our main character here,
Ordenewitz, Otze, is on the record as having been a guy
who understands and respects the rules.
And in fact, a couple years prior,
he won the sportsmanship award
because he called a handball on himself.
- Oh wow, very golfery of him.
- Yeah.
- So what's the difference then?
- Oh, I don't think there's a difference.
I think this is a guy who knows the rule book
and regardless of the morals involved,
he's gonna play by the rules.
And the rules here say
that if you get yourself kicked out of this game
with a red card,
you're suspended the next game.
That happens to work in his favor, so he's gonna do it.
- So we're not actually breaking a rule.
He's actually following the letter of the law
so intently that this is less about gamesmanship
and more about like just good old German efficiency.
- Something like that.
He's breaking an acute rule
in service of following a chronic rule, if that makes sense.
It's like the local and the global.
So the question arises then of how, late in the game,
this is like the 85th or 89th minute,
how do you get yourself kicked out of the game?
- [Steven] I mean, most of us would probably just try
and get a little bit more aggressive, right?
- Yeah, let's truck somebody,
but that's not working for him.
And so what ends up doing the trick is this.
This is during a dead ball, a stoppage in play.
Just boof!
- That's what he...
Wait.
This is amazing.
There's a moment where he's like,
"I've gotta make this one count.
I've really gotta kind of show out on this."
He raises his hands up as if he's angry
or just indignant or something like...
He really sells it.
- That's a pretty classic asshole sports move,
is like, "No one's playing sports now."
I mean, they have another soccer ball.
- I would say it is ubiquitous across all sports actually
that at some point, you just get angry
and you take the one thing that everyone needs
for the sport to continue
and just try and throw it at your parents in the stands.
- Everyone can understand,
"No more, no more sports for the rest of you."
And this does the trick.
He gets a red card.
He gets kicked out of the game.
And it seems like a great success
until moments after the game, I think,
he and the manager are interviewed and it basically comes out
that they're like, "Yeah, we did it.
He's gonna get suspended in the next game,
which is just a regular game.
And he will get to play in the final,
which actually ends up being a matchup
against his former team."
Great stuff.
Except the Bundesliga catches wind of this happening.
And immediately he's like, "No, we're changing the rule.
You're suspended for the final."
- Oh!
- Not only does he not play in the final,
Cologne loses to Werder Bremen, his former team
in penalty kicks.
So they really could have used him.
- Oh!
Wow.
So wait, why are they telling on themselves?
That's my first reaction.
- I think they were feeling a little too proud.
They got a little cocky.
They were like, 'We found a loophole
and they forgot that basically any authority also wields
the God hammer and they can just be like,
"Oh well, we just changed the rules."
- Right, yeah.
It seems like this was the perfect crime
up until they immediately after committing
said perfect crime then publicly told everyone what they did
as if it was like Scooby Doo.
- [Seth] If you walk into a bank and grab a stack of cash,
you don't go to the bank teller and be like,
"Hey, I'm doing a robbery."
And then walk out, you gotta wait...
- "Come on guys, this was easy.
I'm just gonna sit here and linger for a second
before I actually retreat."
Yeah, that's painful.
I was totally on board with all of this
and very much had faith in the plan here
until they actually telegraphed what they were doing.
Is there any kind of blow back and the reaction
to Bundesliga's immediate correction of the rules
because they didn't do anything wrong
except admitting that they found the loophole.
- Yeah, a lot of these things come down
to the spirit of the rule
and I think we can all agree that finding a loophole
is still not really honoring the sportsmanship of the game
or whatever.
I don't know, dumb shit like that.
The league did what it had to do, but fans love this.
This is still...
The thing the coach said to the player, "Just do it,"
has since become sort of a cultural thing
and a rallying cry in the 30 years since then.
- It's painful to hear that they did this immediately
after the game,
because certainly it was unprompted.
If he just leaves it alone, then years later,
he is like lapping it up on a beach,
like he committed the bank heist.
They really didn't need to tell everybody.