SC Paderborn 07SC Paderborn 07 carries the year 1907 in its name, but its history is far more complicated than that number suggests. The starting point is 14 August 1907, when a group of twenty friends founded Arminia Neuhaus in the Neuhaus district. Today’s Paderborn grew out of several local traditions, directly from the 1985 merger in which TuS Schloß Neuhaus joined 1. FC Paderborn to form TuS Paderborn-Neuhaus. In 1997 the club adopted its present name, in which the “07” refers to the founding date of Arminia. The club’s colours are blue, white and black.
The new team began in the third tier and, apart from the 2000/01 season spent in the fourth tier because of a reorganisation of the leagues, stayed there for a long time. Promotion to the second division came only in 2005, after twenty years of patient climbing. Paderborn is also not a classic football metropolis: in a town without a long football tradition, the club had to build its organisation and its supporter base from the ground up. Captain Markus Krösche later recalled that when he joined in 2001, he played at the Hermann-Löns-Stadion in front of only six hundred spectators.
The breakthrough came in 2013/14, when under André Breitenreiter Paderborn won promotion to the Bundesliga for the first time. A decisive 2–1 win over Aalen sealed it on the final matchday. The newcomers were regarded as leading candidates for relegation, yet after three wins at the start of 2014/15, including 3–0 at Hamburg and 2–0 against Hannover, they led the table after four matchdays. That 20 September 2014 match is also remembered for Moritz Stoppelkamp’s goal from 82.3 metres, the longest in Bundesliga history, scored in front of a capacity crowd of 15,000. The adventure ended in relegation from eighteenth place, and a year later Paderborn finished last in the second division, going down for the second time in a row.
The following years brought a rebuilding. Under Steffen Baumgart the club won two promotions in a row and returned to the Bundesliga in 2019. The 2019/20 season, however, ended much like the first: eighteenth place and relegation. Paderborn’s story is therefore that of a club that has repeatedly returned to a place where nobody expected to see it, without the resources of its biggest rivals, and that has made ambitious, attacking football its calling card.
The club’s identity rests on a community that grew up together with it. The same ground that once drew a few hundred spectators was filled to the last seat in the top-flight years, and supporters have stayed with the team through relegations and returns. For many of them the symbol of the club remains the old, modest arena with power lines above the stands.
That symbol is the Hermann-Löns-Stadion, opened in 1957 and used by Paderborn until 2008. The club then moved to a modern ground holding just over 15,000 spectators, built between 2005 and 2008 at a cost of around 25 million euros and expanded before the 2019 promotion. Like the club itself, the stadium has travelled from a modest ground in the Neuhaus district to an arena that has hosted Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich, while its commercial name has changed over the years. The Paderborn region, in eastern North Rhine-Westphalia, thus has a club that still shows that in football one can go from amateur pitches to the Bundesliga without losing one’s own character.