The Eintracht Frankfurt Museum is located in the middle of the main stand of the Commerzbank Arena. On more than 400 m² exhibition space, Frankfurt's sports history is brought to life for visitors there. The museum is managed with a lot of passion and even more expertise by Matthias Thoma, who also offers exciting tours here again and again. Like all other public institutions, the Eintracht Museum is currently closed and guided tours are not taking place. Matthias Thoma takes advantage of this time off to guide you around the stadium grounds in the form of a video, telling you some interesting anecdotes from the stadium's eventful history:
A very interesting clip - love to see more of this! We met with Matthias Thoma in the fall of 2019 for the 2020 edition and talked to him about the museum and Eintracht. With this interview we want to shorten your waiting time for the reopening of the museum and the continuation of the Bundesliga season. Have fun reading it:
Mr Thoma, how does one become the director of the Eintracht Frankfurt Museum? That is not necessarily a job that you can find among common job advertisements.
The branch of sports and football museums is a relatively young branch in Germany, it started around the turn of the millennium. The clubs started to build up collections and from these museums emerged. And since I was in charge of the collection at Eintracht, it was logical for me to set up the museum. Clubs never collected things in an organized way - that was often a matter for deserving members. Or there were showcases in which the trophies were displayed, but you never really had an overview of what you had. Since football has become more and more popular in society, the pieces eventually left the showcases in the president's room and moved into rooms that are open to the public.
What are your favourite pieces in the museum? Is there an exhibit that is particularly close to your heart?
So, my favorite pieces are the really old exhibits from the early days of football: logs, first little awards, pins, memorabilia that were produced or given away in those fascinating early days. They are relatively difficult to get hold of and that is always the most interesting thing for me. The Riederwald, Eintracht's old stadium, was bombed in 1943. A lot of things were destroyed. After the war, they started again in the new Riederwald, opened the office, so we could find a lot of things from the 1950s and 1960s there. But many things from the early days come from private ownership. And you also get things from former players again and again: For example, some once kept a jersey or brought a pennant. Some still have their old sports bag or their football boots.
How do you choose the exhibits then?
Well, our collecting area is mainly focused on things that directly relate to Eintracht. That is, we try to get pennants from matches the Eintracht has been involved in and generally football memorabilia relating to the Eintracht. Another area of collecting is fan-articles. Of course, we can't include the entire fan-article catalogue in our archive, but we do pick three or four fun fan-articles from each season to include in the collection. And we always get articles about fans from the 60s and 70s - for example, we have the oldest fan jersey that was officially produced as merchandise, which is from the 70s. Merchandise got off to a relatively slow start. In the 50s and 60s, people produced it themselves - they put a patch on a flag or a hat somewhere. In the 70s, the clubs then began to make the first attempts at merchandise.
How did the idea to build an Eintracht Frankfurt museum?
The idea to build the museum came about because the collection was getting bigger and bigger and people also care about the connection to history. People always explain it a bit with the commercialization of football - everything is getting faster, players are changing back and forth, but the fans have to confirm "This is my Eintracht!". And the history of the club is now a constant. That's not a special case in Frankfurt, it's the case in all football locations in Germany, that the clubs are increasingly looking at their own history and trying to document it. This now goes back 100 to 120 years at almost all clubs.
At the beginning of the 2000s, many clubs created departments in which fans gather. At Eintracht, that was the fan and support department. They said from the beginning that one of their goals was to preserve the club's history. And with that, of course, you suddenly have a lot of support within the club, because you have a lot of members who support this cause.
What are the plans for the near future?
We are constantly adding to the collection. We are always looking for new exhibits. We also change things around in the museum every now and then and see that we can get new exhibits in. The space is limited, so we have to take other things out. We are subject to constant change, so you can always find something new here.
A few years ago, we founded an association, the "Network of German Football Museums and Club Archives". We meet with them twice a year and that's where cooperations always come up. There are also cooperations with other museums. For example, when we have exhibition projects coming up, we get requests to make exhibits available - whether it's for an exhibition on sport in Marburg in the 1920s or an exhibition on football and religion that's taking place at the Dom Museum in Vienna. We are of course very happy to do that.
We thank Mr Thoma for the interview and look forward to exciting tours after the crisis and many great new Eintracht stories that the club will hopefully give us after this difficult time.
Eintracht Frankfurt Museum
Mörfelder Landstraße 362
60528 Frankfurt
Tel.: 069-95503-275
