Thousands of spectators watch the World Cup football match on the Fan Mile at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
© dpa
The Brandenburg Gate turns into a giant football goal, the Straße des 17. Juni into a playing field: one and a half years before the kick-off of the European Football Championship in Germany, the first plans for the Fan Mile in Berlin were presented on Wednesday.
The Kulturprojekte Berlin have come up with something very special for the "mother of fan miles", as managing director Moritz von Dülmen calls it: The Brandenburg Gate is to be transformed into the "biggest football goal in the world", which means that a football goal will be set up in front of the popular landmark that will also function as a screen, as von Dülmen told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
For this purpose, a green lawn is to be rolled out on the Straße des 17. Juni, a "pop-up park", where football fans, residents of the city and guests can also spend their time between match broadcasts. According to the project, all matches of the German national team will be shown, but also many other matches. The organisers are again expecting hundreds of thousands of fans to attend the broadcasts. For the European Championship, 1.5 million fans are expected in the capital, where the final is to take place in addition to five other matches.
The fan mile is scheduled to open on 14 June 2024. It would be the first public viewing event on the Straße des 17. Juni since 2018. There was no fan mile at last year's European Championship; the organisers justified this at the time with the lack of planning certainty. There will probably also be no fan mile for the World Cup in Qatar. The managing director of the Berlin-based K.I.T. Group, Willi Kausch, said that the fan mile was not feasible because of too many imponderables. In the pre-Christmas period, this would be difficult anyway. In addition, there is the uncertainty regarding the further development of the Corona pandemic.
When the German team won the World Cup in 2014, hundreds of thousands of fans cheered on the team of then coach Joachim Löw on the fan mile between the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column. In 2018, the DFB team was eliminated in the preliminary round. As a result, the number of spectators declined and snack bar owners complained about a drop in sales.