Guest Post: Are you ready for some football? English football, that is.

Massive Wembley Stadium

Hello, this is Matt - I've taken over this blog from Claire so that I can recount my trip to Wembley Stadium to see a real live Premier League football game. 

In April, Claire and I traveled to London where she attended the London Book Fair, while Sophia and I explored the city, its monuments, and its pubs.  April is also the month when English Football really gets hot. Top-tier european football clubs - with their international players, global television revenue, and foreign billionaire owners - compete in many different tournaments, often simultaneously.  Though the World Cup and the Euro Cup only occur every four years, as a British football fan, you've still got three mega-tournaments to look forward to every spring: the Premier League championship (the new, glossy and empty tournament invented in the 1990’s), the F.A. cup (the oldest but less rich English championship, most similar to the NCAA bracket where underdog small-market teams can eliminate the big ones), and if the team is good enough, the Champions League (cue triumphant Wagnerian brass filigree), the most important annual tournament for any European football club.

My friend Mark James, a lifelong Chelsea fan, had secured two tickets for us to see Chelsea play in the F.A. cup semifinals at Wembley Stadium.  As someone who loves soccer but had never observed English football in detail, this match was very educational. 

We had 8th row seats!

The row of security guards separating the two sets of fans.

When I lived in Scotland as a little kid, I saw my first professional football match between the Edinburgh Hearts, and their crosstown rivals the evil Hibs.  My only memory from this match is of my father and his friend convincing  the drunken man in front of us not to beat us with his beer bottle. English football has apparently changed quite a bit since then (although I’m guessing Scottish football is still full of drunk belligerents).  As we entered Wembley stadium, the venue for the English national team and countless U2 concerts, I was struck by the orderliness of the fans.  Everyone was clearly pre-loaded for the match, yet there was an audible hush to discussion within the stadium.  

As it turns out, the London solution to football hooliganism is to turn every stadium into a modern Panopticon with inescapable surveillance and zero-tolerance enforcement.  Cameras use face-recognition algorithms to scan every person who enters the stadium, and locates them in the seats during the game.  If anyone gets out of line, they are instantly recognized, and can be banned from seeing any future game for life.  

Since I was content to do as I was told, this made watching the match safe and fun.  The fantastic seats Mark got were surrounded by lifelong Chelsea fanatics, and we cheered together as Chelsea beat the Tottenham Hotspurs 5-1.  When I learned that due to their Jewish fanbase, the Tottenham Hotspurs used to be called the “yids” as an epithet, and that their fans have since owned this insult and integrated it into their chants, I wanted to root for them.  However this would have been impossible from my seat.  You see, in English football stadiums, you must go to great lengths to prove your loyality to the football club before you are able to buy tickets to their games.  With those tickets, you sit with other club members, and the opposing team is segregated from you by armed guards, steel doors, and the threat of lifelong expulsion.  Despite this, during the match one fellow from the Hotspurs managed to sneak into the Chelsea bleachers.  He sang one cheer in isolation, and was instantly surrounded by heavy dangerous looking security guards.  I’m not sure what happened to him, but hopefully his rendition landed him safely back with his club.

After watching that match, I followed Chelsea for the rest of the season - three seasons in a way since they were participating in the FA cup, the Premier League Championship, and the Champions League.  They eventually won both the F.A. cup (which nobody seemed to care about), and the Champions League, which everyone cared about a great deal, but mostly because of how they won it.  

Chelsea crushed it, 5-1

At the risk of having superfan Mark James never talk to me again, i’ll just come out and say that Chelsea winning the Champions league was one of the most extraordinarily lucky feats i’ve ever seen in 25 odd years of watching sports.  

Do you remember those scenes in the Iliad when, just as the Greeks seem to get their way, Athena swoops down and gives the Trojans a little something which enables Hector to continue steamrolling his path to the sea?  This was the fortune of Chelsea who, at multiple critical moments, over many matches, were touched by the gods at just the right moments.  For example, in a game against the mighty Barcelona and their Achillean striker Lionel Messi, Chelsea was hammered by shots on goal relentlessly for 90 minutes, many shots being saved by fortunate slide tackles or even by the goalpost.  And then in the final minutes, the human katana of Chelsea, Didier Drogba, touches the ball just once and scores to win the match.  This pattern was repeated in the four games I watched as Chelsea progressed towards the championship.  The next day at the lunchtable, my French co-workers could only shake their heads in depression, while my German colleague from Bavaria (home to the second-place Bayern Munich team) was simply disgusted at his team for missing all of their 20 corner kicks, while Chelsea scored with just one (in the 86th minute!).  

This June will see the Eurocup 2012 tournament held in Poland and the Ukraine.  The British papers are full of panic over the ultra-nationalist and neo-nazi hooliganism that apparently plagues football in these countries.  Even in France, two fan clubs for Paris Saint-Germain recently fought against each other (one club was full of skinheads while the other Africans) where a fan was murdered.  But in a London preparing for the 2012 Olympics and its associated global attention and revenue, no amount of security is too little.  This works well for those who are content to sit where they are told, but I fear the consequences for anyone with an alternative voice under the gaze of English cctv cameras.