A trip to Cologne's RheinEnergieStadion told me all I need to know about British football's crouch-and-move seating strategy
Earlier this year I realised a long cherished ambition: to go to the RheinEnergieStadion in Cologne and see Hennes the Billy Goat. Hennes is the mascot of FC K�ln and on Saturday afternoons is paraded along the touchline before the game alongside gaudily clad local carnival nobility while 50,000 fans sing a song about how much they adore K�ln to the tune of The Bonny, Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond. The anthem is plainly on the sugary side because the man standing next to me, on discovering I was English, remarked: "It is good you cannot understand German, otherwise listening to this you would probably vomit."
As if all this were not exciting enough I also got to stand at a top-flight football match for the first time in over a decade. This was a great pleasure. I am no fan of sitting at football. Actually that's not strictly true. It's not the sitting down I object to, so much as the crouching. Thanks to all-seater stadiums many football fans spend a large part of the game in a position halfway between leaping in elation and slumping in despair, a sort of anticipatory squat in which the buttocks hover six inches above the seat. What the public safety risks of this are I'm not sure, but it certainly plays havoc with your hamstrings.
Ever since stadiums went all-seater there has been conflict between those who rise to their feet in moments of excitement and those who shout at them whenever they do so. (In this matter my sympathy is with the former group, if only because the latter tend to be the sort of older fans who always block your view of a last?minute equaliser when they start leaving early "to avoid the traffic" ? though clearly the surest way of preventing yourself from getting caught in a traffic snarl-up is not to go to a football match at all). The effect of this constant battle on the atmosphere at football has been deadening.
It takes my mind back to the 1998 World Cup in France. In Toulouse for the Japan v Argentina game the press seemed to fill half the Stadium Municipal. I remarked on this to the journalist sitting next to me who responded: "One day grounds will be entirely filled by the media, the fans will have to watch on television and the biggest noise will be straight after a goal when 50,000 hacks yell: 'Who was it who put in the cross? Was it No6?'"
My colleague's cynicism may never be justified, but nowadays there are a number of Premier League grounds where almost the loudest chanting comes from ranks of elderly men in car coats and string-backed driving gloves who yell: "Sit down! Sit down!" in unison whenever anybody in front of them so much as cranes his or her neck.
It is plain that such people would be happier if football had the more tranquil, pastoral ambiance of county cricket. Here the punters enjoy the opportunity to sit quietly in the fresh air for hour upon hour doing absolutely nothing. It's like fishing only without the midges. And woe betide anyone who threatens to disturb the peace. Once at a match in Scarborough several decades back a series of yelping appeals from Yorkshire medium-pace prodigy Graham Stevenson (the thinking man's Darren Gough) so incensed one grizzled spectator that he rose groggily to his feet and yelled: "Will you shut up, young fella? Some of us are trying to have a kip." He spoke for the majority.
It's an attitude that already prevails in some sections of non-League football. At a midweek Northern League match a while back some enthusiastic away fans were asked to stop singing by the home side's secretary because "there are people in the clubhouse trying to watch A Touch of Frost".
In truth, of course, few members of a football crowd sit down for the full 90 minutes. There are those who arrive late, those who slip away early and those who combine the capacity to down 10 pints with a bladder the size of a ping-pong ball.
The increase in stadium catering facilities has exacerbated the problem. Enjoyment of any game these days is bound to be regularly disturbed by some bloke, generally so wide, vast and neckless that if he sprayed himself green he'd be a dead-ringer for Thunderbird 2, who apparently suffers from a medical condition that means he has to eat a hamburger and fries every 15 minutes or he will lapse into a coma.
This fellow's twice-per-half trip back from the burger bar is invariably accompanied by the following commentary: "Mind your backs. Scuse, pal. Can you just lift your bag up, pet? Oops! Sorry. Hey, calm down, mate. It'll wipe off with a damp cloth. It's only ketchup. Coming through. Watch your leg. YEEEEEEEEEEEES! GET IN THE NET! There's no need to get so narky, chief. You'll be able to see it on Match of the Day later. Hey, luv, d'you mind if I get those chips out of your hair, only I'm starving."
This did not happen at Cologne.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/may/06/koln-standing-football-stadiums
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