USA-CZE III: the fans

I didn’t really know what to expect when I got to Gelsenkirchen on Monday afternoon, but what I found shocked and inspired me: the entire town center teeming with singing, drinking, exuberant US soccer fans. By way of background, I’ve long considered my affection for soccer to be kind of a rogue taste, and am used to being one of three people in a bar watching a game or the only person in my group of friends or workplace who’s into the sport. And I’ve long looked with envy on people whose nations go nuts for the World Cup, in contrast to the US where even the 2002 victory over Mexico in the Round of 16 made little dent in the cultural consciousness.

I’m not sure what the scene was like in France or Korea, but in G-town, the US fan presence looked like what I’d always imagined one would see from the big countries like Italy or Germany. The NYC fans I met at the train station in Frankfurt told me that the meetup spot for US fans was a place called the Hibernian pub, and by the time I got there at 1.30pm (for a 6pm game), the pub was full of supporters, who had spilled out into the town square in front of the Hibernian and were in full song, literally (see pic).

There were easily hundreds in the town square singing song after song, accompanied by photogs and news cameras. (US fans a news item? Apparently so.) We even had our own crazy eccentric figures: a couple full-on Uncle Sams w/big fake beards, a bunch of dudes in afro wigs dressed like the Harlem Globetrotters, and many, many Elvises (or is the plural Elvi?). And also to my surprise, the US presence in the town center definitely overbore the Czech one. There were plenty of Czechs there, but they didn’t make nearly the kind of impression in terms of noise, numbers, or style that the US fans did. It felt like a watershed moment to me; the day when America’s fans arrived on the world stage (too bad the same couldn’t be said of their team).

The only down note I’d attribute to US supporters relates in part to a group of fifteen or so skinhead England fans who staked out a spot in an outdoor pub terrace (replete with de rigeur Cross of St. George) and did the standard Brit-thug thing. (Shirts off to expose enormous beer guts, postures of langorous aggression to give off that “ready to fight anyone who looks at me cockeyed and is also smaller than me” vibe.) The closest American analog I can think of is motorcycle thugs (and not a cool James Dean “Rebel Without a Cause” biker, but rather a fat, mean Hell’s Angel whose hobbies include quaaludes and date rape). Of course, hools will be hools (and to be fair, these guys did not try to start any shit) but what got under my skin was that a couple really cute girls decked out in US regalia approached the England dudes to chat them up. Seeing the US girls with the fat thugs made me feel what it must be like to have a little sister when she goes through the standard late-teenage “date an edgy scumbag” phase. Yellow card to these American gals.

Of course, the way the US played in that game didn’t do our growing following any favors, and may have set the cause of soccer in this nation back a ways. It’s one thing to fly across the globe to see your great team win (Brazilians do this with regularity); it’s still appealing to shell out for international travel to see your hard-battling national team play well but go out with dignity to superior competition; but it’s really hard to think of a reason to pay that much money and go through that much trouble to see your team play poorly and lose badly.

The other problem is that most Americans approach the game with the prior that the US sucks, so it’s very very hard to convince people that our soccer team is any good, while the casual followers interpret even the slightest bump in the road as confirmation of our essential crappiness. Thus a bad WC will tend to drive away more fans than a good WC will draw in.

Finally, though, let me say this: the Czech fans were a class act all the way. Not one of them acted lame (by which I mean violent or particularly obnoxious) before the game when they were outnumbered by US fans and generally looking kind of dejected about it. On the contrary, I saw plenty of US and Czech fans taking pics together, disproving the notion that support for your national team and antipathy for its opponents are necessary correlates. And during and after the game, the Czechs were just, well, happy. They celebrated the goals, sang for their team, and took off. No one taunted US fans (that I saw, anyway) or tried to start a fight or broke windows in the town center. There may have been incidents, but from what I saw, they were by far the exception rather than the rule.

{Pic: US fans in full voice outside the Hibernian pub in Gelsenkirchen town center.}