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Refugees displayed their homemade signs at Hamburg’s Millerntor-Stadion for the match between F.C. St. Pauli and Borussia Dortmund.Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

HAMBURG, Germany — Ibrahim Ismail had decided to make a placard for each of his five Syrian and Iraqi friends the moment he heard they would receive a free ticket for Tuesday’s soccer match.

“They say, ‘Thank You, Hamburg’, ‘Thank You, St. Pauli’ and “Many Thanks, Germany,’ ” Ismail said, showing off messages he had carefully printed, in German and Arabic, on scraps of cardboard with a black marker.

The six men proudly displayed their homemade signs to thousands of German supporters as they streamed into Hamburg’s Millerntor-Stadion. Almost all of the fans who passed them were wearing black T-shirts with the image of a skull and crossbones on the front, the emblem that is the calling card of F.C. St. Pauli.

A few days earlier, St. Pauli, a team in the second tier of German soccer that has become famous for its punk rock ethos and social conscience, offered 1,000 free tickets for this week’s exhibition against Borussia Dortmund to recently arrived refugees, including Ismail and his friends. The effort was a part of a larger response, sparked by organic gestures by fan groups, that has brought discussion of Europe’s migrant crisis into stadiums across Europe.

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Officials and players of St. Pauli and Borussia Dortmund walked onto the field hand in hand with refugee children.Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

While national governments and the European Union continue to bicker over a response to the continent’s biggest refugee crisis in generations, soccer fans — especially those in Germany — have been raising banners of support. Now clubs are following their lead.

Bayern Munich has pledged $1.1 million to set up a training camp for recently arrived refugees, and Real Madrid and Paris St.-Germain have donated similar amounts. The Portuguese club Porto wrote to UEFA asking that it have teams in the Champions League donate money from match day ticket sales to humanitarian efforts, and the Italian giant Roma, owned by the American Jim Pallotta, announced this week that it would donate more than $700,000.

“The final straw was seeing the pictures of refugees and seeing the 3-year-old kid dead on the beach,” Pallotta said in a telephone interview Tuesday, referring to the pictures of Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian-Kurdish refugee found dead on a Turkish beach. Many have credited the images with changing public opinion about the refugees.

In addition to its financial donation, Roma has also set up an initiative that encourages other clubs and fans to raise money for refugee charities. Pallotta said Roma had special reason to act because many of its players have been touched by past crises.

“No European club is city — or country — specific,” he said. “Look: We have Mohamed Salah from Egypt, Dzeko from Bosnia, Gervinho from Africa. A lot of players are directly related to where refugees are coming from or going to.”

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In Hamburg, compassion has been offered on a more one-to-one level, offered in everything from food and clothing to handshakes and legal advice. To refugees like Ismail and his friends, the friendship has been a welcome surprise. “We feel there are still some people who love other people,” he said.

“We feel like we are not alone during this difficult time,” added Ismail, who arrived in Germany two months ago from Raqqa, the Islamic State’s unofficial capital in northern Syria. Behind him, a huge white banner with the words “Refugees Welcome” was unfurled high up on the Gegengerade east stand.

Many of the refugees invited to St. Pauli’s match with Borussia Dortmund live in camps around the port city, including one that is a few minutes’ walk from the district that gives F.C. St. Pauli its name.

“A chance to meet the neighbors!” joked Christian Prüss, who works for St. Pauli and has been in charge of the club’s response to the refugee crisis.

A few hours before kickoff Tuesday, Prüss was nervously smoking a cigarette inside St. Pauli’s empty stadium as his phone rang constantly. Like others and the club, he views the humanitarian effort as more of a responsibility than an act of charity.

Besides donating the 1,000 tickets, St. Pauli raised 45,000 euros, over $50,000, in 24 hours — enough to help finance a search-and-rescue boat stationed in the Mediterranean.

“Always the club is without money, we are famous for it,” Prüss said of St. Pauli. “But we have credibility.”

The club’s roots are in the working class St. Pauli neighborhood, famed for the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s red-light district. It was here that the Beatles honed their trade from 1960 and 1962, and where the neighborhood’s social activism and radical politics often bleed into the stands of the Millerntor.

“We think we can provide more than just football,” Prüss said. “Not just about 90 minutes. We have a responsibility for the people around the club.”

Few take that responsibility more seriously than the St. Pauli fans. Since 2004, the Ultras St. Pauli group has been visiting refugee camps around Hamburg, bringing clothes, food and lawyers to help the migrants navigate Germany’s complex asylum applications.

“It is a kind of radical way to support a football club; we are not just supporting a football club but politically, too,” said Lucas, one of the youngest members of the group, which unlike other right-leaning and sometimes violent ultra organizations, campaigns on everything from ending racism to supporting gay rights. As is common with hard-core European supporters groups, Lucas declined to give his full name.

“It’s why I love this club,” Lucas added. “But German society is divided into two parts. One part supports the refugee struggle and wants to help.” The other, he said, believes the opposite. “They think: ‘We don’t need them’, ‘It’s too much’, ‘Go back home,’ ’’ he said. “I can’t imagine how these people think.”

One Syrian the ultras met in a refugee camp, Megd Abo Amsha, was so taken by their commitment that he ended up joining the group. Nine months ago, after an aborted attempt to reach Western Europe through Moscow shortly after he was drafted into the Syrian army, Amsha, 23, left his home in Damascus, crossed the mountains into Turkey and paid smugglers $6,000 to ferry him across the Mediterranean. From Sicily, he said, he took trains crisscrossing Europe until he arrived in a camp in Hamburg. There, Amsha said, he met members of the Ultras St. Pauli who took him to a match.

“I was really sacred,” he said. “I didn’t know who the people were and I didn’t know what St. Pauli was. I had no idea where these guys were taking me, but when I got here I found a really positive atmosphere. It felt like family.”

Amsha kept returning to the Millerntor, helping other refugees by translating from Arabic into his newly learned German.

“Most of the Syrian people don’t believe in people who say they are helping anymore,” he said. “You don’t see people helping people for nothing. It is a matter of rebuilding some trust, rebuilding humanity.”

On Tuesday night, the Millerntor had filled with a crowd of more than 25,000 fans by the time the players of St. Pauli and Borussia Dortmund walked onto the field hand in hand with refugee children.

Among the Dortmund team were players with their own recent histories of exile, including defender Neven Subotic, a Bosnian Serb whose family fled Banja Luka for Germany during the Yugoslav War and eventually settled in the United States, and Adnan Januzaj, whose Kosovar family fled to Belgium from the same conflict. In the crowd, banners were raised. One read: “Say It Loud, Say It Clear, Refugees Are Welcome Here.” Another proclaimed, “No Border, No Nation” in English and Arabic.

As has been the case for much of the past four seasons, St. Pauli quickly fell behind, conceding two goals before pulling one back through the United States under-20 international Fafa Picault. The match ended, 2-1. After the final whistle, the players from both teams walked to the four sides of the stadium, with the St. Pauli team carrying a banner that said, “Welcome,” and the Dortmund players displaying another that said, “Refugees.”

Later that evening, outside a bar underneath the Gegengerade stand where St. Pauli fans drink beer after games, punk rock was playing at earsplitting volume as the 1,000 or so refugees walked home to their camps.

“Too bad we didn’t win,” said Amsha, the Syrian St. Pauli ultra, before leaving early. He had a German exam Wednesday morning, part of the studies — cut short when he was called into the Syrian army — that he now hopes to complete.

“We can help build a society here,” he said. “This is the only society that gave us a chance to be part of it.”

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