The poll by the ARD public broadcaster said 21% of respondents agreed with the proposition.

“It is racist. I feel we need to wake up. Many people in Europe had to flee… searching for a safe country,” Nagelsmann said on Sunday.

The 36-year-old said he agreed with Germany midfielder Joshua Kimmich, who described the questionnaire as “racist” a day earlier.

“Josh [Kimmich] responded really well, with a very clear and thought-out statement,” Nagelsmann said at a briefing at his team’s training base.

“I see this in exactly the same way. This question is insane.”

“There are people in Europe who’ve had to flee because of war, economic factors, environmental disasters, people who simply want to be taken in," he went on.

“We have to ask what are we doing at the moment? We in Germany are doing very, very well, and when we say something like that, I think it’s crazy how we turn a blind eye and simply block out such things.”

ARD - the German public broadcaster - said it had commissioned the survey to have measurable data, after a reporter working on a documentary on football and diversity was repeatedly asked about the make-up of the national team.

The poll was conducted among 1,304 randomly selected respondents.

Karl Valks, sports director with the ARD station who commissioned the poll, said the company was “dismayed that the results are what they are, but they are also an expression of the social situation in Germany today”.

“Sport plays an important role in our society, the national team is a strong example of integration,” German media cited him as saying.

The current national squad has a number of players with mixed heritage, including captain Ilkay Gündogan and winger Leroy Sané.

Germany is hosting the Euro 2024 tournament later this month, and Nagelsmann said his team would be playing “for everyone in the country”. They will kick-off the competition with a clash against Scotland at Munich’s Allianz Arena on 14 June.

The controversy comes just weeks after the team’s kit manufacturer, Adidas, was forced to ban fans from buying German football kits customised with the number 44, after media raised their resemblance to the symbol used by World War Two-era Nazi SS units.

The SS was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis. Members of the SS ranged from Gestapo agents to concentration camp guards. SS duties included administering death camps where millions of Jews and others were put to death.

  • klisklas@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    63
    ·
    1 month ago

    Not a football fan, but good answer to a stupid racist question. Journalism needs to reflect on how their reporting is enabling the far right and legitimising racist talking points in society. At least here in Germany the media plays a substantial role in the rise of the AFD and normalising right wing policies.

    • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      20
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      At least here in Germany the media plays a substantial role in the rise of the AFD and normalising right wing policies.

      You are suggesting incompetence where there is malicious intent. The capital in this country owns the mass media, and as they did in the past, they would rather sacrifice democracy than their wealth and power. Our conservatives are right wingers when push comes to shove, believe me.

      • neeeeDanke@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        24
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        This is about a poll conducted by a piblic brodcaster, your comment makes no sense in this context.

        • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 month ago

          I was responding specifically to this:

          At least here in Germany the media plays a substantial role in the rise of the AFD and normalising right wing policies.

          I suppose I should quote that in the above comment, my bad

          • neeeeDanke@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 month ago

            Fair, but I don’t see how that quote implies this role to be unintentional, which seems to be the main poit in your original comment to me.

        • trollercoaster@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 month ago

          The public broadcasters are trying very hard to imitate the private media and keep quoting even the worst examples of them (the “Bild” tabloid for example) as a source. So the situation of commercial media has very well something to do with the situation of the public broadcasters.

      • klisklas@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 month ago

        Please don’t excuse shitty journalism. These people earn good wages and have a standing in German media. They can speak (relatively) freely, but decide to do differently.

        • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 month ago

          I’m not at all excusing it, I’m fact I am pointing out that the media is owned by our capital and will thus work to maintain their interests. And their interests are to not lose their wealth and power, more than maintaining democracy or anything else really.

          So they, and by extension their media, are complicit in the rise of far right ideology, because fascism is better than a revolution for them, rich people tend to lose their wealth, power and occasionally their heads during revolutions.

    • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      36
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      I don’t think a survey question can be racist. An answer can, and I’m not sure that not knowing the answer is better than knowing it.

      Edit: No wrongthink on feddit.de, got it.

      • FiskFisk33@startrek.website
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        33
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        I get what you are saying but I disagree. Such a question comes with an implication that whoever posed the question thinks both answers are valid, unless the context implies otherwise.

        Edit: No wrongthink on feddit.de, got it.

        Oh come on now, people disliking your opinion is not the same thing as you being silenced, get over yourself.

        • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          18
          ·
          edit-2
          1 month ago

          The downvote button is not the “I disagree” button. It’s a “this is irrelevant or destructive to the conversation” button. “I get what you’re saying but I disagree” to me indicates you don’t think my comment was either.

          If the question was phrased as “Is the German national team diverse enough?” - which asks for the same opinion - would that be somehow better?

          This type of finger-in-ear nonsense is the type of behaviour that leads to Germans supporting a genocide in 2024 and AfD’s success being a surprise.

            • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              14
              ·
              1 month ago

              Outright stating that you are trying to destroy conversation- congrats, you have provided a great example of a real reason to downvote.

              • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                8
                arrow-down
                3
                ·
                1 month ago

                My pleasure. Idownvoted this one as well, because I disagree with your take.

                Example:
                A user posts a brain dead take on a topic = I downvote because it’s not worth the effort to correct

                A user posts an incorrect statement about a topic I can meaningfully contribute = I’ll not vote. I’ll instead conribute my stance.

                A user posts a neutral post and maybe I even agree with it = Upvote and maybe a comment.

                This any anything inbetween. Sometimes the example user is myself ;)

          • idiomaddict@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            16
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 month ago

            This isn’t reddit, there’s not a rule for what the downvote means. Further, there’s no consequences for downvotes, so I don’t see how it stifles conversation.

            • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              4
              arrow-down
              7
              ·
              1 month ago

              This attitude towards the downvote button came from reddit, because Reddit started hiding responses with an arbitrary number of downvotes, which most Lemmy clients emulate. That’s how it stifles conversation.

              • idiomaddict@feddit.de
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                9
                ·
                1 month ago

                Reddit also has karma barriers for posting in various places, which literally stifles conversation, in that you will not be able to respond if you have enough downvotes. I don’t think it’s really comparable.

      • mustbe3to20signs@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        22
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        Asking people if something is “white enough” is extremely racist, reproduces stereotypes and normalizes this bullshit. Nationality isn’t a matter of skin color.

      • pepperonisalami@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        Sorry to see you downvoted, but hear me out. If I create a survey, for example, asking: “do we need to carry out a ethnic cleaning on a certain ethnicity of this country?” It implies that:

        1. The survey creator and people who approve of it think that there is a substantial chunk of people who will say yes.

        2. That the idea is a valid one and if you don’t agree with it, it is valid for others to think that it is reasonable.

        The idea of killing/kicking-out of people based on their race, is a part of what defines racism. The survey which validates such an idea, is racist.

        • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          5
          ·
          1 month ago

          I don’t know how you got from point 1 (which is valid - but do you think there aren’t Germans who will say yes?) to point 2?

          How does an something being an answer on a survey make it a reasonable answer? If surveys should be limited to reasonable answers, how do we ever quantify how many unreasonable people exist?

          • pepperonisalami@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            1 month ago

            The problem here is that it’s a yes or no question. It’s not “how do we solve problem x” but “should we just deal with x by doing y?” - which is a call for action in that exact line of thinking.

            This survey is not objective, it’s subjective, with racism as part of the subjectivity.

      • jwt@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        1 month ago

        A question can be wrong (Have you stopped beating your wife?). Especially in a questionnaire, you need to be careful when formulating a question, so to not skew the results. A question can also be ‘wrong’ when the outcome is useless no matter what results you get (in scientific research you actually try to achieve the exact opposite, so that even if a hypothesis is invalidated, you’d gain some useful knowledge)

          • jwt@programming.dev
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 month ago

            I (think I) see what you’re getting at. Wrong isn’t necessarily the same as racist (although I would assume racist questions to be a subset of wrong questions). I think you’re bright enough to think of a racist question that mimics the ‘wrong question’ example I gave.

      • klisklas@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 month ago

        It can be. Great question from German media would have been if they asked the audience something to reflect on the treatment of Mesut Oezil in the past for example. It was a complete racist shitshow at that time and nobody was bothered.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    German head coach Julian Nagelsmann has condemned as “racist” a recent survey that asked participants if they wanted to see more white players on the national football team.

    Many people in Europe had to flee… searching for a safe country," Nagelsmann said on Sunday.The 36-year-old said he agreed with Germany midfielder Joshua Kimmich, who described the questionnaire as “racist” a day earlier.

    "ARD - the German public broadcaster - said it had commissioned the survey to have measurable data, after a reporter working on a documentary on football and diversity was repeatedly asked about the make-up of the national team.

    “Sport plays an important role in our society, the national team is a strong example of integration,” German media cited him as saying.

    The current national squad has a number of players with mixed heritage, including captain Ilkay Gündogan and winger Leroy Sané.

    The controversy comes just weeks after the team’s kit manufacturer, Adidas, was forced to ban fans from buying German football kits customised with the number 44, after media raised their resemblance to the symbol used by World War Two-era Nazi SS units.The SS was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis.


    The original article contains 437 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 54%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    if only the poll was a plant by the German cia/fbi equivalent to root out racists and put them on a watch list. that’s 274 people on a do not fly list or something.

    it wasn’t, isn’t and won’t be. But if only…

  • Yurnero91@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    28
    ·
    1 month ago

    So when germans want to have more white people again on the football team it is racist.

    When black people want to have more blacks on the german football team it is ok.

    Ok, I get it.

    • nyctre@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      Oh, yes, please, tell me more about how you feel underrepresented in football/sports.

    • solo@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      Please keep in mind that all (neo)colonial powers have a history that is intertwined with racism. Germany is no exception.

      Racism in Germany - wiki

      Racism in German history is inextricably linked to the Herero and Namaqua genocide in colonial times. Racism reached its peak during the Nazi regime which eventually led to a program of systematic state-sponsored murder known as The Holocaust. According to reports by the European Commission, milder forms of racism are still present in parts of German society. Currently the racism has been mainly directed towards Asian and African countries[1] by both the state and through the citizens which includes being impolite and trying to interfere in internal matters of African countries by the diplomats…

    • WallEx@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      30 days ago

      One is a repressed minority, the other is a repressive (in some parts) majority.