Niklas Füllkrug arrived early at the Adidas campus on the outskirts of Herzogenaurach, a picture-postcard town in Bavaria that was due to host the German national team ahead of this summer's European football championships. Staff had been told that players would start arriving on Monday morning, a few days before the opening match. But Füllkrug, one of the team's forwards, didn't arrive until Sunday evening.
He had decided to make the 300-mile journey from his home in Hanover on a high-speed train operated by Deutsche Bahn, Germany's national rail company, which was not only a sponsor of the tournament but was also meant to be the environmental champion for the event.
But years of neglect to invest in rolling stock, upgrade railways or digitize signal boxes have left Deutsche Bahn notorious for delays and cancellations. In a country that has long prided itself on efficiency and punctuality, Germans – and fans – have been warning for months that these problems could mar the tournament.
So it came as little surprise to Furkurk when he was crammed onto a train packed with high school kids on a school trip, answering their questions about life on the national team the whole way.
By the time he reached Herzogenaurach, he'd been traveling a few hours longer than expected — not ideal preparation for an elite athlete on the eve of a major tournament. Still, the delays at least vindicated his decision to take the extra time. In Germany, it's worth, as Füllkrug put it, “to show the German railways a little respect.”
The hundreds of thousands of fans from across Europe who gathered with him in Germany, and a surprising number of them from the United States, will no doubt understand what he means after an often tension-filled opening week.
Deutsche Bahn was central to Germany's planning for the games, with the company offering discounted “climate-friendly rail travel” and organisers boasting it would be the “most sustainable” European Championships. When the matches were decided in December, stage decorations included miniature versions of Deutsche Bahn's long-distance high-speed trains.
But as fans flock to Germany to support their teams, the country's rail network is straining: Before the tournament began on June 14, Munich transport officials were deployed to hand out popsicles to passengers stranded for hours on trains across the city, unable to sleep in the heat.
In Gelsenkirchen, an industrial city in the Ruhr region, some England fans, worried they would miss their team's kickoff, decided to walk three miles to the city's stadium after the trams stopped running. In Stuttgart, Hungarian fans arriving at the city's central station to watch the game on Thursday found the station had been replaced by a huge hole due to extensive renovation work that began in 2010.
Instead of arriving through a huge hall, disembarking passengers will be ushered through a huge wooden tunnel that snakes towards the city. “I'm here to show them around,” says a representative of the Hungarian consulate, one of a dozen officials sent to guide arriving passengers, but who did not want his name attached to the operation.
Despite their best efforts, some fans became disoriented by the tunnel's length, and even though they nearly made it through, they turned back and headed back the way they came to get out of the station faster. (Deutsche Bahn recently announced that the completion of its Stuttgart project has been delayed again until December 2026.)
In Hamburg, Cologne and Düsseldorf, local transport is holding up a bit: after Hungary's match against Switzerland in Cologne on June 15, trams lined up outside the stadiums to try and clear the traffic as quickly as possible.
Long-distance trains, which offer discounted fares to fans, are similarly unpredictable. Germany's rail network covers more than 20,000 miles, but about half of the track has been removed in the past 70 years, and growing demand for freight and passenger traffic has left existing lines overcrowded.
A delay on one train can have a cascading effect on others, causing delays along the entire line. According to Deutsche Bahn, only 63 percent of the line's trains arrived at their destinations on time last month. Deutsche Bahn has an on-time arrival rate of over 100 percent, compared with over 94 percent in neighboring Austria and 87 percent in France.
The situation is so embarrassing for Germany that Felix Duxel, a columnist for Der Spiegel, one of the country's largest media outlets, felt the need to “issue an apology in all 21 languages of the convention” last week for the state of train services. (At least he takes it in good humor: After all, what could be more environmentally friendly than no trains running?)
“We can beat Germany, but we will lose to Deutsche Bahn,” he wrote.
Critics accuse the system of underinvestment in the decades since Deutsche Bahn was founded as a private company in 1994 by combining the former East and West German state railways. The German government is the sole shareholder.
“The lack of funding has been clear strategically for a long time,” said Andreas Knie, a professor at the Berlin Social Science Center who studies transport and technology. “As a rule of thumb, the amount that should have been invested in rail was probably twice as much as was actually invested.”
For a while, the system worked: When Germany last hosted a major tournament, the men's World Cup in 2006, Deutsche Bahn's slick service was hailed as a key element of the tournament's success, helping to foster an enduring image of Germany as a smoothly run, thoroughly modern country.
This time, many fans – and Fürkrug – have learned to treat the timetable as a guideline. But that didn't help Austrian fans trying to get to Dusseldorf to watch their team play France last Monday. Dozens of fans were stranded just after crossing the German border, and some only made it to the stadium in the second half.
Deutsche Bahn said it would personally apologise to those left behind. “We ask fans to get in touch,” said Ralf Thieme, manager of Deutsche Bahn's station, which deals with passengers. “We will find an appropriate and fair way to compensate them.”
The problem has become so severe that Germany has earmarked 40 billion euros ($42.7 billion) for investment in its aging railways despite a government spending freeze. Work is due to begin on 40 major lines starting this year.
Deutsche Bahn has already warned that dozens of construction sites on key lines will mean more delays, but at least fans have nothing to worry about: work isn't due to start until July 15, the day after the final.
Tariq Pandya and Christopher F. Schutze Contributed report.