In America, fall is for college sports. We live in the South, so we’re no strangers to the tailgating culture of Saturday football and while it isn’t our go-to activity (there’s a reason this trip is barely overlapping with college basketball season…), we did start to feel the need to have a little bit of sport in our lives. When in Europe, that means soccer (aka the “fake” football). Luckily for us, Paris Saint Germain was just a quick Metro ride away and happened to be playing the Swedish team Malmo while we were in town. According to our only friend who watches soccer when my husband floated the idea by him over G-chat the night before, “Fuck! I forgot about Champions league!! Yes go!! Paris Saint Germain is one of the best teams in the world!” So that settled it, we needed to buy tickets.
Let me rewind for a second and say that the last soccer game I attended was probably in 1992 when my sisters played for the rec league in North Texas. The Shooting Stars were alright, but they were also 9 year old girls who spent half the game making flower chains in the goalie box. Needless to say, I was unsure of what to expect here! [Ed. note: Never been to a soccer game in my life.]
We bought the cheap seats…and were delighted to learn those actually meant we bought the hoodlum seats. We were 6 rows off the field, just behind the goal, and immersed in the most passionate fans I’ve ever encountered. They had songs and chants and 3 large bass drums brought in by the fans. Not to mention, we were 5 seats away from the Malmo section. That’s right, in European pro soccer, the fans are so…passionate…that the visiting team fans are only allowed in one small corner section. And this section is guarded on every side by no less than 20 cops in full riot gear…which they use at will during the game. They also separate the visitor section from our hoodlum section by a full plexiglass wall and a net as high as the entire stadium. And the section has an added layer of stadium security guards. Plus, they police barricade the area outside the stadium for 10 blocks in any directions so you may only enter at your specific gate and the visitor section has their own entire gate area secluded from anyone else. [Ed. note: Concessions and bathrooms are also segregated by section. We were only granted access to one concession stand and one big bathroom for our hooligan section. The Swedes had their own bathrooms and food stand.]
I’ve been to LSU-Bama football games, surely this level of hate and drunken fans cannot be worse than Southern frat boys, right? Apparently so. The fans for either team spent at least half the game watching each other instead of the field and one of our neighbors took it upon himself each time Malmo starting singing a team song to “conduct” them…using both of his middle fingers. The kicker came at half time when one of the Swedes used the distraction of the riot police charging at his fellow seat mates to light a PSG scarf on fire and wave it about the stadium….
Neither of us actually know the rules of soccer…or French. But we decided VERY quickly that we were going to do whatever it took to stay on the good sides of our neighbor fans and waved our hands and chanted and sang whenever the PSG fans did as well. (I think they were singing “Old MacDonald” at one point, but changed the words to something French and the E-I-E-I-O to Ole Ole Ole!) We were thrilled when the home team won 2-0…and we booked it out of there immediately to flee any reciprocation from the angry losing team, who were still chanting away as time expired…
favorite wanderers 