St Pauli Fans UK

Welcome to the home of FC St. Pauli fans living in the UK

This website is designed for fans of hamburgs FC St Pauli, We hope you enjoy and if there is any problems with the site or anything you would like to see added dont hesitate to drop us a line.  We hope to get all the latest news from millerntor in the coming weeks after we set up a news page, this will also be greatly benificial when the new season starts in a few months.

Viva Sankt pauli

Contact  Us At

stpaulifans@stpaulifans.cjb.net

The skull and crossbones has become a symbol of the fans of the St. Pauli Football Club – if not of the club as a whole – that is known throughout the length and breadth of Germany. Leaving value judgments out of account, its history has been one of appropriation and commercialisation such as otherwise tends to occur only in the worlds of music or fashion.
It began in the mid-eighties, the period when the fan culture first took root at the Millerntor stadium which would later determine the character of the club and make it famous.
At this time a group known as the “Black Block” used to meet on the back straight behind the trainers’ benches. The group was thought to consist exclusively of residents of the highly controversial Hafenstrasse housing. This however was not wholly accurate, as it actually included a number of people living in the neighbourhood district of St. Pauli who broadly speaking belonged to the widely ramifying alternative scene. What came into being at the Millerntor was thus no more and no less than a "mirror of society", as countless sociological surveys have shown to be frequently the case at German football arenas.
One of the group in question, known as “Doc Mabuse”, actually did live at Block 6 in the Hafenstrasse, and it was he who first brought the skull and crossbones flag to the stadium. At the time this flag was the Hanseatic version of the widely familiar squatters’ symbol, and had links to a centuries-old tradition of piracy (in Hamburg associated from time immemorial with the name of  Klaus Störtebeker). The message, then, was “Poor against rich”, “Workers against bosses” and the like.

The St. Pauli club once again rolled up its Bundesliga competitors from behind, and in next to no time had achieved promotion from the third to the first division. It even managed to hold its own there with notable success, in spite of minimal financial backing. This was exclusively put down to the determination of the team, and to the unshakable support provided by the so-called “12th man” – namely, the Millerntor fans. So the club’s fans cheerfully took on the role of the underdog, fighting undismayed against the overweening well-heeled clubs with clout, and along with this adopted the skull and crossbones banner as an appropriate visual identification.

This development was anything but welcome to the club’s managers and to older spectators, who basically saw the skull and crossbones as a symbol of violence. Nor was the official fan shop able or willing to respond to the rising demand for accessories in this line, restricting itself to the issue of outmoded stickers and pennants and so on. The fans then, as so often, took matters into their own hands: the independent fan shop founded in the 1989/1990 season put T-shirts, sweaters and other articles on the market which proved immediate hits in fan marketing, and what is more became an important element in the financing, or self-financing of the fan support network.

But even the St. Pauli club did not remain totally impervious to the Bundesliga boom, and at the start of the nineties a new company, St. Pauli Marketing GmbH, engaged with the task of putting what came to be known in modern parlance as “merchandising” on a modern footing – in other words, when it came down to it, to supply the demands of the fans. To start with the company entered into an agreement with the fan shop that only the latter should sell the range carrying the skull and crossbones symbol, while the company would limit itself to a traditional assortment of goods. But opinions seem then to have shifted, and the Marketing company bought the rights to use of the skull and crossbones (licensed rights by this time) from the former owner, a backstreet textile printing works in the Kiez quarter. With the founding of yet another company – FC St. Pauli Vermarktungs GmbH Co.KG – in October 2000 and the assignment of the rights of use, the rights are now vested in the club. 

By now the symbol has even gained entry to the club’s official “Corporate Identity”. The “Starclub” advertising campaign, launched in 1998, gave the skull and crossbones equal prominence alongside the club’s coat of arms.
The high point of the story so far was the appearance of the skull and crossbones symbol on sweaters of the 2000/2001 season, prominently displayed in the middle of the collar,. That is the present state of play in a history that started more than 600 years back somewhere on the oceans of the world, was continued 15 years ago by beer-drinking squatters in a German football stadium and perhaps may yet end – who knows? – on the stock exchange.

'Sven Brux'©