In fact, FC St. Pauli is not really rooted in the left-wing workers’ sports – but in the often nationally oriented bourgeois “Turnbewegung” (gymnastics movement).
Its oldest predecessor, the “Turnverein in St. Pauli und vor dem Dammthore”, had been founded as early as 1860. Sometime later, it merged with the “Hamburger Männer-Turnverein” to form the “Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein”.
The gymnastics movement stood for values such as order, discipline and bodily fitness. Many gymnasts dismissed football as a chaotic “Fußlümmelei” (nonsense with feet) or English disease.
Correspondingly, the “Spielabteilung” (games department) of the Hamburg-St. Pauli-Turnverein, which had allowed football since 1896, was often under the threat of being dissolved.
However, the early “Kiezkicker” do not give in. When in 1924, in the course of the “clean divorce”, many gymnastic clubs separated from “non-gymnastic” sports, they founded their own club: the “FC St. Pauli von 1910 e.V.”