Selber

On 27 December 1998, during a home match against Straubing, Selb forward Jaroslav Hauer collapsed on the ice and died of cardiac arrest. The club he played for at the time, ERC Selb, was itself living on borrowed time: within six years it had run up debts of roughly 250,000 Euros and gone insolvent.

What rose from the 2004 insolvency was a new club, VER Selb e.V., registered that May and started again from the sixth tier of German hockey, the Bayerische Bezirksliga. It took six years to reach the Oberliga, and eleven more to win it: the 2021 Oberliga championship carried Selber Wölfe up into the DEL2, and a year later the club split off its professional side into Selber Wölfe GmbH.

Home games are settled at the Netzsch-Arena, a 3,983-capacity ground the town's players have called home under several names and owners since well before either bankruptcy. Nobody in the Oberliga or DEL2 stirs quite the same feeling as the Bayreuth Tigers, a neighbouring rivalry so entrenched that it is simply known locally as the "Knallerderby" — the derby, with no other name required.