1.FC Union Berlin 1. FC Union Berlin was formally founded on 20 January 1966, when East Germany reorganised its sports societies into dedicated football clubs, though the tradition on which it drew stretches back to 1906 and FC Olympia Oberschöneweide, based in the same working-class district of Köpenick. Throughout the East German era, Union stood in deliberate contrast to city rivals BFC Dynamo, the club patronised by Stasi chief Erich Mielke that won ten consecutive East German titles between 1979 and 1988 amid persistent allegations of refereeing favouritism. Union, rooted among the factories and cable works of Köpenick, became known as the club of ordinary East Berliners, an identity that survived German reunification even as the team spent most of the following decades outside the professional leagues' upper tiers.
That grassroots character produced two of the most striking episodes in modern German football. In 2004, with the club facing financial collapse, fans organised blood-donation drives, channelling the payments they received into Union's accounts to help keep it afloat. Then, facing the closure of their stadium on safety grounds in 2008, more than 2,300 volunteer fans, electricians, students and pensioners among them, contributed over 140,000 hours of unpaid labour to rebuild the Stadion An der Alten Försterei from the ground up, an effort still commemorated by a monument bearing every volunteer's name.
The club's sporting breakthrough came in 2019, when Union secured promotion to the Bundesliga for the first time in its history. Success followed quickly: a fourth-place finish in the 2022-23 season brought qualification for the UEFA Champions League, in which Union made its debut the following season against opponents including Real Madrid and Napoli, becoming one of the smallest clubs, by budget, ever to appear in the competition's group stage.
Known to their supporters as Die Eisernen (The Iron Ones), Union have also built a distinctive matchday culture around their stadium, nowhere more visible than at the annual Weihnachtssingen, a Christmas carol evening that began in 2003 with 89 fans and has since grown into a gathering of tens of thousands. Despite its rise into European competition, the club has largely preserved the community-driven character that first set it apart, with the Alte Försterei remaining, in both a literal and symbolic sense, a stadium built by its own supporters.
