In our column “Green Space”, Oliver Fritsch, Christof Siemes, Stephan Reich, Anna Kemper and, as a substitute for the European Championship, Laura Sophia Jung, take turns writing about the world of football and the world of football. This article is part of ZEIT am Wochenende, issue 26/2024.
My parents, my brothers and I sit on the sofa and armchairs in front of our television, thigh to thigh, bent over in uncomfortable tension. It’s loud, not just on the television, but also because my family is arguing, shouting and cheering. I join in, even though I don’t understand how the game works.
That was in 1998, the World Cup final in France, one of my earliest football memories with my partly French family. France beat Brazil 3-0. I was six years old and what I understood then is that football is something you have to experience together.
That there has to be someone you can shout out your own tension to and with whom you can share your relief when the opponent’s chance sails just over the bar in injury time. Or your own (thanks to Niclas Füllkrug) ends up in the goal. That you have to hold on to someone when you’re waiting for the taker to score or mess up the penalty (oh God, how long can you delay a run-up, it almost happens in slow motion, just do it!). And that you can only be really happy together.
What I still don’t understand is how public viewing on megalomaniac fan miles has become a way of experiencing football together. Because there is nothing, absolutely nothing, about it that is shared. At public viewing, the others are the enemy. At least, almost all of those who didn’t come with me.
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It starts hours before the game, when you have to secure and then defend the best seats, just like at a boy band concert. Football fans may scream an octave lower, but otherwise they are hardly any different from 13-year-old Natural or US5 fans. There is shoving, backpacks and elbows are rammed into your stomach, and when you fight your way back to your group after going to the toilet or the bar, you are accompanied by deadly looks and passive-aggressive sighs.
Of course, you have to allow at least an hour for going to the toilet or the bar because of the long lines. At the opening match of the European Championships, people waited three hours in the beer line in the Olympic Park. That’s two whole football games or the first half of a Frank Castorf production. Only even more painful because you’re almost certain, at least as a woman, to be talked to about half-knowledge of football at a public viewing or – even worse – tested. If I had received a euro for every time a slightly drunk man asked me about lineups or wanted to know whether I could really explain offside, I could have bought overpriced public viewing beer for the rest of my life.
When the game finally starts, in most cases I see nothing. Or rather, the backs of heads. I’m not 1.60 meters tall and that may be why I’m the problem myself. But there’s nothing I can do about it.
At least in the stadium I have tiered seats. And the feeling of immediacy. Every moment in the stadium is sudden and irrevocable. Something happens, you’re there, then it’s over. No amount of slow motion in the world can bring the moment back. And that’s why it’s not so important whether you saw the dribbling clearly. You felt it, you were part of a big “ooooh” that washed over the stands.
At public viewing, you’re more likely to be fighting not to get lost in the crowd. And you barely notice the game itself. Because at public viewing, football has long since become nothing more than background noise for a party, not the reason.
The fact that the illusion of public viewing as a way of watching sport together persists, especially in Germany, is due to the eternal reference point of the 2006 summer fairytale. In the mid-2000s, there was a trend in Germany to give banal things an English name to make them seem hip. This was intended to create the illusion of cosmopolitanism (some would say fact). At the height of this Denglification, in the summer of the 2006 World Cup, the mass phenomenon of public viewing emerged. And just like the key account manager, public viewing is above all: a scam.
The euphoria and sense of togetherness of what, in retrospect, was a magical World Cup has been illustrated so often with images of the then new mass phenomenon of public viewing that the false conclusion that the latter would bring about the former persists.
At least for now. The Berlin Fan Mile is already collecting ideas on how to manage public viewing without football: In the preliminary round, not all games were shown at the Brandenburg Gate, but Kick It Like Beckham. And the artificial turf there is also a pop-up park.
In our column “Green Space”, Oliver Fritsch, Christof Siemes, Stephan Reich, Anna Kemper and, as a substitute for the European Championship, Laura Sophia Jung, take turns writing about the world of football and the world of football. This article is part of ZEIT am Wochenende, issue 26/2024.
My parents, my brothers and I sit on the sofa and armchairs in front of our television, thigh to thigh, bent over in uncomfortable tension. It’s loud, not just on the television, but also because my family is arguing, shouting and cheering. I join in, even though I don’t understand how the game works.
