I'm not much of a football fan (shocking, I know). Meaning I mostly watch the Euros and the World Championship, but that's me done for. Even then, I mostly root for a. Romania, on the off-chance we qualify; b. some of the other European countries my ancestors came from. Not Germany, though. c. any team who seems to have attractive players, a memorable coach, or even just funky characters hanging around its bench.
I know.
Yet, seeing how much fun my extended family were having going to matches, I couldn't help myself. I had to at least try. I bundled up cozy, and left the house looking the part. I had a scarf and a shirt, and looked all serious but good-timey in the same line.
Of course, I laughed at the sexually explicit chants (before joining in).
Of course, half the time I wasn't sure where the ball was.
Of course, I cheered when I was meant to be booing once or twice.
I'm sorry, my only other experience of this is concerts, and we don't really boo much there. Though there, too, you lose sight of the singer sometimes because you're busy participating in that amazing communal trance. Same as on a football stadium, apparently.
It wasn't striking, at all, because it was mostly what I'd expected. I've watched enough football, and still had vivid in my mind the memory of Spain winning the European Cup in a packed square in Barcelona last year. I think I have some sense of the transcendental at-onement that exists in sports.
And yes, if you strip it of its religious connotations and look at it this way, atonement (while still spiritual) takes on a fantastically powerful glow.
Anyway.
The sense of belonging to a kind of family. And why it belongs for better or worse on football stadiums and at concerts. At least for now. It did not escape me that while we cheered on our team, compatriots were gathered in the largest square in Bucharest, protesting corruption letting themselves once again be manipulated by the powers that be. It's easy to point a finger, but to be fair, this need to belong to something greater than yourself is tremendous, and under-nourished, it can easily eviscerate all that is good and holy in our world.
The trouble with needing to belong is others know you've got it, also, and clever people can (and often will) use it to pull your strings just the way they want them. Dangerous stuff. I kept thinking, does it really matter, to me personally, or to any of us really, if 'our team' loses tonight?
What in your life tomorrow would change? Precisely nothing. Is it stupid, then, to root for them? To put your all in shouting silly songs against the opposite team? Moreover, is it selfish or perhaps without consequence, to channel this longing for the herd into something matterless, instead of something 'useful'?
I don't think so. Because most people live largely unexamined lives, which makes them succeptible to external interference and manipulation, which makes it dangerous, this seemingly noble impulse to put your need for at-onement to good use.
Good use for whom?
It's worth asking.
I thought, also, of the way the hipsters and the 'intellectuals' in the street typically look down on the people in the stands at the game last night. Simple people with simple pleasures. Or is it. Looking down on a man with a $10 hooker when yours cost a neat hundred is just a matter of nuance.
The team we rooted for, specifically, is a hooligan's team, something tricky to explain, I suppose. Aren't all football teams? Not exactly. This one, specifically, is the gypsies and hoodlums. The dangerous, aggressive types. I was talking with my friend only that morning, and her reaction was "oh but so many gypsies like that one".
Yes, they do. And they fully embrace it. They chant about causing a ruckus. And they chant about the other big teams in my city being with the army, the cops, and the miners, which the newly elected democracy post-1989 hauled in to disperse and savagely attack protesters in the street when democracy proved to be not so swell, after all. So basically these guys are saying yeah we're hoodlums, but at least we're honest hoodlums.
I guess that's all you can ask for.
They also have their own version of a 1989 street chant, The Hooligans' Hymn. Because it was hooligans then, not 'good, honest people' who took to the street to fight a paranoid dictator.
Better a hoodlum
Than a dictator
Better a hooligan
Than an activist
Better dead
Than communist
We used the same chant during the pandemic. Because dead would still beat falling for their stupid, divisive, murderous slop any day. So hearing it in the stands was certainly interesting. For better or worse, these people were much more likely to come protest when the world actually turned unjust. The hooligans and gypsies, I'll stick with that lot, thank you.
At the end of the day, I prefer the at-onement at a concert, which I'd gotten to experience the day before. The orgasmic high of losing yourself entirely to the lyrics, of singing with your entire person along with the random strangers surrounding you. Preferable to a stadium, to me, and definitely preferable to being in the street.
