Before the Yellow Wall, there was a meeting a priest couldn’t stop. Dortmund, 1909 — a pub, eighteen founders, and a name borrowed from a bankrupt brewery.
THE DESK — NOTES & REMARKS
Club lore has Dewald getting knocked down the stairs when he tried to break up the meeting — great visual, but it's not securely sourced, so we cut it and stuck to 'refused entry.' Also caught BVB's own English write-up saying Christmas Eve came 'four days later,' when 19 to 24 December is actually five — used the correct gap instead of copying their error.
THE LOWDOWN — THE FULL HISTORY
THE OBJECTION
In 1909, young men from a Catholic parish in Dortmund wanted to play football. Their chaplain, Hubert Dewald, objected. Both the club and the parish tell the same story: an extra Sunday-afternoon devotion got in the way of their games, and the players decided they needed a club of their own.
THE MEETING
On 19 December 1909, they gathered at the Zum Wildschütz pub to break away from the parish youth association. Dewald arrived to stop it and was refused entry. Some of the men pulled out rather than go through with the break. The meeting went ahead anyway. Borussia Dortmund was born that night.
THE NINETEENTH FOUNDER
BVB officially honours eighteen founding members. But the club's own museum researchers also credit a nineteenth man: Reinhold Richter, a travelling waiter who helped get the group playing football and proposed forming a club in the first place. By the club's own account, he never actually became a member.
THE NAME
Borussia is Latin for Prussia, but Dortmund traces the club's name to the local Borussia brewery. That brewery had already gone bankrupt in 1901 — eight years before the club existed. The brewery went under; its name went on to win the Champions League.
THE COLOURS
The founders' first shirts were blue and white with a red sash and black shorts. Black and yellow, the colours now synonymous with the club, weren't approved until 1913.
THE COST
Breaking away carried a price. Parish records show the founders were expelled from the youth association at a Christmas Eve worship service, and some of them left the club afterward. It wasn't a rejection of their faith: some founders still married in the same church and had their children baptised there.
MORE FROM FOUNDED
THE TERRACES — DISCUSSION
The argument also lives in the YouTube comments ↗.