The national team travels by bus. The DFB team doesn’t have to travel very far in the preliminary round of the European Championship. Other nations have chosen more remote accommodation.
The German national team travels by team bus to its three preliminary round matches at the home European Championship.
The DFB selection has moved into its quarters in Herzogenaurach in Franconia and will play from June 14th against Scotland in Munich (around 200 kilometers away), Hungary in Stuttgart (200 km) and Switzerland in Frankfurt/Main (210 km). The team of national coach Julian Nagelsmann took the train from the training camp in Blankenhain to Herzogenaurach.
The federal government and the European Football Union UEFA have repeatedly emphasized the importance of sustainability for the tournament. The European Championship should show “how impacts on the environment, resources and climate can be minimized and – if necessary – offset,” says a paper from the Interior Ministry, for example.
Accordingly, the venues were divided into three regional clusters to reduce travel times for fans. Each nation plays in a cluster at least twice in the preliminary round.
DFB team travel as a topic of debate
However, the teams were not obliged to set up their quarters in the south (Frankfurt/Main, Munich, Stuttgart), west (Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne) or north/east (Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig). An extreme example is the Spanish, who are based in Donaueschingen, deep in the south, with preliminary round matches in Berlin (753 km away), Gelsenkirchen (555 km) and Düsseldorf (510 km).
The national team’s travel arrangements have been discussed from time to time in recent years. One controversial issue was a short-haul flight from Stuttgart to Basel from one game to another in the Nations League in September 2020, when strict Corona rules were still in place for rail travel. According to the DFB’s justification at the time, the risk to the players’ fitness spoke against the bus journey.
Since then, the association has often relied on train travel for domestic trips. The DFB campus in Frankfurt/Main is conveniently located near the airport station of the Main metropolis.
Source: Stern
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