Is Your Stadium Your Temple?
To dream of watching the game by satellite
Stefano Caselli
Milano 1999, Stadio G. Meazza photo ©Olivo Barbieri
About a month – seven hundred hours more or less: that is the length of time I have spent in stadiums throughout my life. It’s a rough estimate of course, something you could never prove, but I’ve been going for 25 years. The first time I was exactly five and a half, and the concrete step was so comfortable that I fell asleep. Since then I have never stopped. Taking a minute to calculate all the variables, I probably go to around fifteen matches a year, with 90 minutes’ playing time and half and hour before and after. I won’t go through all the calculations, but it works out to about a month in total.
And it’s not just because I love football. That goes without saying. I love stadiums. And I recognise them all, straight away, from the terraces, even if terraces don’t really exist any more. Boring Sundays spent watching the TV, with live matches on every channel, do have one merit: I can choose which one to watch according to my own personal criteria. I don’t care who’s playing, I just go for the stadiums I like the best. When I was a boy, and I sat in the quieter areas of the stadium, sometimes I stopped watching the match and hung on to the railing to admire my side’s terraces, which were obviously the best in the world. The most interesting thing about a goal is not the technical skill, but the explosion of joy from behind the goal mouth.
go onto Google earth, and try taking yourself on a mystery tour. How do you work out where you are?
I belong to a strange tribe, with an overruling passion for a blood-red strip, which the less prosaic onlooker might call wine-coloured. Torino fans are maybe the only ones in the world who treat their stadium like a temple, even though it’s little more than a ruin. Many years ago it was home to a truly uplifting team. They all died, together, when their plane crashed into a hillside and since then one way to remember them is to take a walk on the pitch where they played. All that is left of the stands is a couple of Art Nouveau style stumps. On a moonlit night it can even look romantic.
Maybe this is why I love stadiums. Or maybe it’s because stadiums represent one of the many faces of a city. Go onto Google Earth, and try taking yourself on a mystery tour. How do you work out where you are? In the suburbs all the roofs look the same.
You know you are in Barcelona because of the unmistakeable Camp Nou; you recognise Madrid from Santiago Bernabeu; you can work out what part of London you are in as soon as you see the outlines of Anfield Road or Stamford Bridge. The clearest thing on the Roman skyline is the white roof of the Olimpico. Dortmund is blurred, but the Westfalenstadion always stands out (and while we’re on the subject, how is it that in Germany they still have terraces without seats? Why them and not us?). And what can I say about the Allianz Arena in Munich (why don’t they make them like that in Italy?).
This satellite exploration of the world of football is a social experience across the continents.
Go to Buenos Aires, run your mouse along Rio de La Plata, and you will find the aristocratic Estadio Monumental Antonio Vespucio Liberti grounds of River Plate, and Los Millionaros in the Nuñez barrio; head south-west and you get to the cramped Bombonera of the yellow and blue Bosteros boys, the “manure collectors” of the del Boca barrio, where Diego Armando Maradona grew up.
Then cross the Atlantic and look for Hamburg: in the north-west you will see the futuristic Aol Arena of Hamburger SV, the team that everybody knows. Further south, right in the centre just by the river port is the little Millerntor Stadion which hosts the matches of St. Pauli, the team of the area where the city’s night life and red light districts lie. A little further on is the legendary Cavern where the Beatles first played. No matter what division the white and green team is playing in, the Millerntor is always full.
Every football strip represents a different face of the same city: after all who says that you choose your team and that it doesn’t choose you (if the team can be bothered, that is)? Distant echoes of a social DNA which is diluted, maybe even extinct, but which still lives on in stone, in the buildings dedicated to ancient passions. And like all passions, these can only be explained up to a certain point. There are mountains of books on football, but if you just don’t get it, never mind.
The best answer has to be that of a Sardinian shepherd in the days of the legendary Cagliari team led by Gigi Riva in the sixties and seventies: a journalist asked him what he stood to gain if Cagliari won, and, surrounded by his sheep, with his transistor radio pressed to his ear, he shot back: “And what do I stand to gain if they lose?”
