BSG AOK Berlin
BSG (=Betriebssportgemeinschaft) AOK Berlin was the men's football team of the (not only) sports club BSG AOK operating in Berlin's (formerly; now legendary) companies league. The BSG club was founded in the 1950s at a time when the allies had forbidden sport clubs to form after WWII. Instead, clubs were organised through companies. One famous example of this is Bayer Leverkusen, Germany's football champion of 2024. They were originally a companies team as well, but have of course developed a bit differently since then.
AOK Berlin was one of the biggest and most important BSGs for many decades, but just as many other companies teams started seeing a downfall and lack of interest in the 1990s when the ultra capitalism from UK's and US' 1980s trickled down (lol) slowly to Germany and companies stopped funding their teams.
In 2000, the BSG AOK Berlin merged with Thomas Stelter's football team BSG Nestlé in order to have enough players to continue at least their first men's team. It was then, when the team's captain Sven Steller, head of the university department of the AOK, recruited Ralf Wunderlich to join the team and club, after he saw him in the Kühler Weg (now Hans-Rosenthal-Sportanlage) football stadium with his university league football team Absoluter Angstgegner.
Soon later, Florian Schwarz joined the team as well. During the following years, the BSG AOK Berlin recruited several more young players from the university league team X-Men Soccer, such as Jens “Don” Hellinge, Patrick Wolf or Alexander Grzondziel, thus forming a competitive team, replacing former aging players, now seeking to move to the older league levels (32+, 40+ etc.).
From 2001-2003, the team's name was BSG AOK Berlin / Nestlé, but eventually Nestlé disappeared from the name again, probably because the company lost all interest in the team when trying to figure out how to monetize water. After relegating to the lowest companies league division in 2001, the team promoted back to the second highest tier during the following years, led by president Frank Müller and longterm captain Alexander Scheutzow.
In 2010, the AOK Berlin company merged with the AOK Brandenburg due to financial difficulties, and in 2011 further merged with the AOK Mecklenburg-Vorpommern under the name AOK Nordost. At that time, many people from the former AOK Berlin were dragged out of the company - and also the sports club. The new leadership replaced long-standing players with new trainees which in some cases were known for their football background. On top of that, the company gave jobs to upper amateur level football players like Mehmet Aydin, Samet Ünal or Fatih Erdem who back then all played in the Oberliga under the condition that they would also play for the AOK's football team. This was possible, as the football association had changed their rules, so that all players were allowed to play in both league systems.
This led to a short surge in success culminating in the win of the Berlin Companies Cup in 2016 and 2017, and a couple of top places in the highest companies league division, but always behind Gillette (whose team was full of semi-pro players like legendary striker Michael Fuß). This new scheme unsurprisingly didn't last long and the team disbanded in 2018.
The BSG AOK Berlin football team might still exist on paper, but they haven't played an official football game since 2018. There are still other sports being played in the BSG AOK though, for example table tennis and bowling.
List of players (incomplete):
- Florian Schwarz
- Thomas Stelter
- Ralf Wunderlich
- Frank Müller
- Alexander Scheutzow
- Christian Baier
- Dirk Bär
- Jürgen Hessler
- Frederic Maux
- Roman Schulz
- Eike Ticks
- Patrick Stache
- Frank Böttcher
- Sebastian Gohlke
- Jens Hellinge
- Stefan Hirsch
- Burhan Ünal
- Samet Ünal
- Fatih Erdem
- Mehmet Aydin
- Stefan Grundmann
- Stefan Kretschmer
- Ulf Schneider
- Igor
- Sven Steller
- Stefan Kastner