Frankenderby against Nuremberg: The Fürth crash is taking shape

It has long been assumed that the German Football League’s computer is a cool and calculating machine. So that when he draws up the game plan for the new season, he does his job soberly. And takes into account who might meet whom on their way out of town at a motorway service station, when Helene Fischer is giving a concert and where else the police are needed when there is a match day coming up.

Now we know: the computer thinks even further. And: He has a sense of dramaturgy.

On the 32nd matchday, 1. FC Nürnberg comes to SpVgg Greuther Fürth, shoots their arch-rivals out of their own stadium and sends them tumbling towards the third division. That could have been the idea that the DFL computer had last summer when it wrote the 276th Frankenderby for the first weekend in May in the program booklet for the 2025/26 two-league season. That would have been a pretty indecent, even malicious idea.

But then reality intervened.

For a team second to last in the table, Fürth played an amazing first half on Sunday afternoon. Anyone who interpreted the 90 minutes in terms of the result could also see it this way: Anyone who is so superior and still goes into the locker room with a 1-1 score looks like a relegated player. In fact, it didn’t even take an overly convincing Nuremberg team to give Fürth’s fall into the third division more and more shape – the cloverleaf took care of that itself.

The first goal of the afternoon was an up and down like the entire Fürth game: When Noel Futkeu scored (13th), the whole of Fürth was up in arms, then it dawned on the fans that the linesman had raised the flag. The cheering stopped – and promptly started again when the video assistant intervened and the goal was still recognized. Not only did the Nuremberg team bear this moment with composure, they also seemed rather uninvolved in the first half and couldn’t have really known why it was 1-1 at the break after a goal from Fabio Gruber (45th + 3).

At FCN you can never be completely sure which FCN is actually playing again today. Is it the person who, at least on particularly good days, has what it takes to meet even the highest standards and always delivers when he has to deliver? Or is it the person who fiddles a bit and gives the impression that they don’t really know what they actually want?

“When things got a little looser and there was nothing more at stake, we performed very poorly,” says club coach Klose

“Whenever there’s pressure,” Nuremberg coach Miroslav Klose said before the derby, “we played pretty decent to very good games. When things got a little looser and there was nothing more at stake, we performed really badly.”

So that was the central question that made the Frankenderby interesting from Nuremberg’s perspective: Does the team have the grit to deliver in a game in which their entire existence as a second division team is not at stake, but in which no one in their right mind would seriously claim that it is about nothing? Their coach Heiko Vogel had already announced before the game that the Fürth team would be “ready for a riot”. “For me,” he said, “it’s about a title.” That set the tone. And his team backed up their words with actions – but only for 45 minutes.

Then Klose apparently let his team know in the dressing room that the game was already on. And when Nuremberg started to take part in this game in the second half, they were on top and could easily have taken the lead through Julian Justvan (57th). The club now played much more resolutely and pleasantly, but there was hardly anything from Fürth until substitute Dennis Srbeny had a great chance (78th). And so the cloverleaf remains in 17th place. Now it’s against Hertha BSC and – also a punchline of the game plan – competitor Fortuna Düsseldorf. These are the last opportunities to avert relegation.