German football club Hamburg have been relegated from the Bundesliga for the first time in the club’s history.
Despite beating Borussia Moenchengladbach 2-1 in today’s clash, the club weren’t able to do enough to secure safety — ending their 55 year tenure in Germany’s top flight.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the home fans took the blow very poorly, and ended up delaying the end of the game by 20 minutes by throwing flares onto the field which ended up producing an almighty amount of smoke.
Chaos reigned and riot police with dogs and horses came on to the pitch to interrupt the game and restore order. Eventually the match simply had to be abandoned.
Don't know what to say about what's just happened now.
So here goes. Pyro. Game stopped, literally the whole stadium chants: "We are the people of Hamburg, and you're not" towards that section of the north stand #HSVBMG pic.twitter.com/XzXVeg5Cyq
— Felix Tamsut (@ftamsut) May 12, 2018
Still, nice to see Hamburg have taken relegation well. pic.twitter.com/6SQ0pemcjV
— Nooruddean (@BeardedGenius) May 12, 2018
Adding even more drama to the heated affair were the actions of Borussia Moenchengladbach’s fans. While the Hamburg stadium famously has a clock that shows how long the club has been in the top-tier of German football, Borussia Moenchengladbach’s faithful brought their own clock…
This one was counting down the minutes that Hamburg had left in the top-tier of German football.
What a diabolical way for Moenchengladbach fans to tease Hamburg:
a choreography about how many minutes Hamburg is far from being relegated, changing the minutes as the clock goes by pic.twitter.com/ZzS8jHL3CP— Tancredi Palmeri (@tancredipalmeri) May 12, 2018
So maybe we can’t be all that shocked that tensions boiled over when the Bundesliga’s “Dinosaur,” as Hamburg are known, said its painful goodbyes.
Elsewhere, Hoffenheim and Borussia Dortmund joined Schalke and champions Bayern Munich in the league’s top four.
