The Magic of the DFB Pokal Cup

Ok so let’s get this out of the way first: the DFB Pokal Cup is really just the German equivalent of the FA Cup, but in our eyes there is something so much more magical about the artefact itself. In terms of understated elegance and subtle design…it fails miserably. But what it does do is transport us back to a time where grotesque opulence was all the rage, and not in a pansy soundbite-happy “Greed is good” kind of way. No, the DFB Pokal is the modern encapsulation of that real old-school Roman Empire cock-and-balls-out aesthetic, the kind of statement that says: ‘If you don’t like it, I will literally build a 20-foot gold statue of you sucking me off right outside your house. And then feed you to the lions.’ Ok well maybe not the second bit, but you get the picture.

Anyway, the internet fails to adequately give this delightful piece of goldware any proper back-story, so we at STT are not really sure how this item actually came into being. Initial suggestion that it was perhaps hand-crafted by whoever it was that made the eponymous ring in Lord of the Rings was of course dismissed as ridiculous; everyone knows Sauron’s been dead for hundreds of years. But still the question remains, and it seemed only right that we used the full spectrum of STT’s influence to try and track down the meaning behind this historical relic.

Our first line of inquiry took us from the sunny squalor of London out to the beautiful plains of Haiti, to a rambling and feral man living in a shopping cart, known to the locals as a wizard. Through much drug-induced meditation we experienced what can only be described as a spiritual journey, with expanded minds wandering (metaphorically of course) a crooked path both to self-discovery and revelation. Together with sporadic pep-talks from this wizard, we came to the epiphany that the DFB Pokal is in fact a living memoriam to the 20^th Century’s biggest pimps. Through a combination of voodoo magic and luck, the essence of Richard Pryor, Huggy Bear, Rick James, Dr Dre and James Brown was distilled into a large jewel-encrusted cup for the whole world to see. Quite how it found itself in Germany as a reward for a football cup still escapes us, but seriously there was no way we could chew any more peyote to find out.

Secondly, we followed a much more ridiculous lead that seemed to suggest that the DFB Pokal was actually the Holy Grail. Now we all know that back in the late-1930s, the Grail was finally uncovered by this awesome American college professor called Henry Jones Jr, but as part of the recovery process, the Grail was lost for eternity down a huge hole in the ground near Petra, Jordan. With that explanation unfortunately off the table, we were left with just one final thought, and given that we reached this conclusion through good old fashioned investigative journalism and not hallucinogens, it probably holds the most water. Yes, the Bundesliga actually came into possession of the DFB Pokal by dining at popular American restaurant chain Medieval Times, where each ticket comes with a free take-home goblet. I feel somewhat empty having potentially cracked the mystery, but as is the motto for the British teenage self-harming support line, the truth hurts.