A Rollercoaster of an Idea: What Osnabrück Taught the Giants
Every so often a piece of footage does the rounds that makes you reconsider what a football club’s supporter base is actually capable of when left to its own devices. This week it was VfL Osnabrück, a second-tier German club, unveiling a fully functioning rollercoaster as pre-match tifo ahead of a German Cup tie against Bayern Munich. Marbles ran along a track built by fans, powered by nothing more than gravity and a great deal of patience, while eighty thousand or so watched on in something approaching disbelief.
It is, on any measure, a remarkable piece of amateur engineering. It is also, I would argue, a useful prompt for those of us who follow the game here to think a little harder about what match-day choreography means at grounds like Giants Stadium, and whether the comparison is even a fair one to draw.
The Bundesliga Context Is Not Ours
It would be easy, and slightly lazy, to simply ask why our own tifo culture cannot produce something similarly ambitious. The truth is that German football operates under a supporter ecosystem built over decades around ultras groups with dedicated budgets, standing terraces and a level of organisational infrastructure that Australian sport, still a comparatively young commercial product in its current form, simply has not developed. Comparing a marble rollercoaster built by a club with a fanatical hardcore support to the banner work at an AFL fixture is a bit like comparing a state league reserves match to a Cup final — different codes of intensity, different traditions, different economics.
That said, there is something worth extracting from the episode beyond mere spectacle, and it is this: fan-generated theatre, when it is allowed room to breathe, tends to say more about a club’s identity than anything the marketing department can produce in-house.
Where GWS Sits in the Conversation
The Giants occupy a curious position in this discussion. As a club still building organic support in a rugby league heartland, GWS has, understandably, leaned heavily on club-produced pageantry — the pyrotechnics, the big screen productions, the guernsey-reveal moments — rather than anything bubbling up unprompted from the outer. That is not a criticism so much as an acknowledgement of where the club sits in its life cycle. You cannot manufacture twenty years of terrace tradition; it has to be earned, generation by generation, and GWS is still relatively early in that process.
Even so, there have been flashes of something more homegrown at Giants Stadium in recent seasons — supporter groups coordinating flags, the growing presence of the cheer squad banner runs, small pockets of colour that suggest the raw material for genuine fan culture is there if the club is prepared to cultivate it rather than merely tolerate it.
The Governance Angle Worth Considering
This is where I think the AFL Commission and individual clubs, GWS included, could take something practical from the Osnabrück example, without needing to bolt a rollercoaster onto the Homebush forecourt. German clubs generally afford supporter groups considerable autonomy over choreography, with clubs providing logistical support — storage space, access to the ground before kick-off, modest funding — rather than dictating creative content from above. It is a partnership model, not a top-down one.
Australian clubs, by contrast, tend to keep tifo and pre-match theatre tightly within the marketing department’s remit, understandably wary of anything that might clash with broadcast requirements, sponsor real estate or simply run over time in a tightly scheduled free-to-air window. That is a legitimate constraint; the broadcast deal is the financial bedrock of the competition and nobody sensible wants to jeopardise it. But there may be scope, particularly at a ground like Giants Stadium with its compact bowl and reasonably flexible concourse areas, to give an established supporter group a genuine say over one or two moments across a season, rather than every piece of pageantry flowing top-down from head office.
A Word on Cost and Proportion
It should also be said plainly that Osnabrück’s effort, remarkable as it was, almost certainly required a not-insignificant outlay of volunteer hours and materials from a supporter base with a long history of doing exactly this sort of thing for European away trips and domestic Cup ties. Replicating that here overnight would be unrealistic, and frankly a little forced. Manufactured spontaneity has a way of reading as exactly that — manufactured — and crowds are not easily fooled by choreography that has been focus-grouped into existence.
The more sensible path, in my view, is incremental: seed small supporter-led initiatives, give them room to fail without embarrassment, and let anything genuinely good grow organically over several seasons. Rome was not built in a day, and neither, evidently, was a functioning rollercoaster — reports suggest the Osnabrück build took months of planning by a dedicated crew before matchday.
What This Means for the Broader Product
There is a wider point here too, one the Commission would do well to keep in mind as it continues to negotiate the balance between broadcast polish and genuine crowd atmosphere. The AFL product, for all its administrative sophistication, can sometimes feel over-managed at the margins — every element scripted, timed and cleared through several layers of approval. The charm of the Osnabrück display was precisely that it felt unruly, slightly chaotic, and entirely unsanctioned by any marketing brief. That unpredictability is, arguably, what separates genuine fan culture from stadium entertainment.
Clubs like GWS, still writing their own history rather than inheriting one, have an opportunity here that longer-established clubs perhaps do not: a relatively blank canvas on which supporter identity can be built deliberately and collaboratively, rather than retrofitted onto decades of existing tradition. Whether that results in anything as elaborate as a rollercoaster is beside the point. What matters is whether the club is prepared to cede a little control and trust its growing supporter base to fill the space thoughtfully.
A Measured Conclusion
None of this is to suggest AFL crowds ought to start building amusement park rides in the concourse before finals. It is simply to note that the Osnabrück display, viral and slightly absurd as it was, is a reminder that the best match-day theatre tends to come from supporters given genuine ownership rather than a script. For a club like the Giants, still in the process of forging that identity from scratch, there is a genuine opportunity in that lesson — provided it is approached with patience, proportion and a healthy respect for what a supporter base can build when trusted to do so.
