Chemical Pigs Out! Locomotive Pigs Out! VfB Leipzig fans climb over security fence seeking to join others storming the Sachsen fan bloc during the May derby at Bruno Plache Stadium photo: author. The scene was like nothing I had witnessed before: exciting, frightening and more than a little bewildering. It was January and the occasion was an inconsequential indoor soccer tournament being put on by the German Football Association in the eastern German city of Leipzig during the long winter break in the German Bundesliga schedules.
Also confusing were the epithets being thrown around. Who were Chemie and Lok? I worked up my courage and asked a teenager standing near me if he could explain and I learned that the fans were referring to the East German predecessors of VfB 1. The passions on display at that rather inconsequential indoor tournament were the product of a long-standing antipathy, the rough outlines of which are as follow below. FC Lokomotive Leipzig in Post, both teams underwent significant restructuring in a bid to find their place on the newly-unified German football map.
For VfB , the first port of the call in was the German second division where a third place finish catapulted the team into the Bundesliga for the season.
The top tier proved to be rather inhospitable to VfB and the team finished in last place beginning a decline that would continue for the next decade or so. For FC Sachsen , the path led to the German third division, a level of competition which at that time was organized on a regional, not national, scale. This meant that any path upwards to the national 2nd Bundesliga would be very difficult with teams having to get past multiple contenders for one of the few promotion spots available each year.
This would prove to be a hurdle that FC Sachsen would never be able to clear. At that time, the team was still playing in the mammoth Zentralstadion , a dilapidated ground that had been built in the mids by volunteer labourers who piled up masses of war rubble to create a giant bowl.
