World Cup fans are just soccer parents with passports

As an avid sports fan, I’ve gone to many great sporting events. Among my favorite sports memories was attending two World Series games including one where the great Albert Pujols hit multiple home runs. It was truly incredible to witness despite the inconvenient fact that he was hitting them against my team.

Walking toward MetLife Stadium for the Final felt less like attending a soccer match and more like accidentally wandering into the United Nations after everyone had been given espresso and a drum.

Everywhere you looked there were flags. Evidently flags aren’t just symbols.  They are an entire clothing line.  There were flags draped across shoulders, worn as dresses and head scarves, flags on hats, and flags painted on faces. If Gucci doesn’t release a flags line next Spring, they’ll evidently miss an important market.

And it wasn’t just the flags representing the two contending countries, Spain and Argentina.  Fans came dressed in the jerseys of their respective countries even if their teams had been knocked out at the beginning of the tournament.  Some fans even went a little further. I was lucky enough to meet “Uncle Sam” in line at the Fan Shop.

Besides flags, there were drums, horns, songs and lots of cheering.  The cheering was the most interesting thing to watch (sometimes more interesting than the actual game).  

It wasn’t even cheering exactly.  More like steady cardio-infused chanting.  Once a group started it the entire stadium joined in.

I quickly discovered that World Cup fans don’t just watch soccer.  They experience it with every ounce of their being.

In the U.S. we clap, we yell, and we cheer.  Occasionally we even break out the “wave.”  International soccer fans are quite different.  They chant together as if they’d rehearsed together for six months.  I’ve been to Broadway shows that seemed less choreographed.  It’s pretty impressive.

They also experience the game intently.  They gasp loudly at missed shots and go wild when a goal is scored.  That may be because goals are so rare.  That’s always been my own personal bias against the sport.  A game that ends at regulation without a single score isn’t exactly riveting (and this particular Final did exactly that).  I guess that’s where the fan participation comes in.  The “show” isn’t entirely what’s happening on the pitch.  It’s what’s going on all around you.

In the middle of all of this, it dawned on me where I’d seen this level of intense support before.  For over a decade, I was a youth baseball mom.  The only difference was these fans had passports, and I’ll confess, much better cheers.  But they both share the same intense belief that the referees/umpires don’t know what they’re doing and aren’t afraid to say so.

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The halftime show was quite spectacular, but truth be told, I think the audience at home probably saw more of it than I did from my seat. That’s particularly true with Madonna’s “appearance.”  She basically performed the entire sixty seconds in the tunnel of the stadium. That was a little disappointing. I should note, however, that I never expected to see Tom Cruise in the flesh.  I definitely saw him.  Thank you, FIFA.

At the end of the game, a fight broke out.  Someone in our group observed that it seemed a fitting way to end an international sport played in the United States.  That seems a bit cynical, but when you consider the fact that the entire event was introduced like a UFC fight, it’s not surprising that a little American sports culture crept in there. In any event, I’m pretty sure a Little League umpire somewhere saw the melee and thought, “amateur hour.”

As a mom, watching Lionel Messi fight back tears was unexpectedly moving. Every sports parent eventually realizes something heartbreaking: one day you'll watch your child play for the last time, and you won't know it's the last time until you're driving home.

Which brings me to my last point.  The Argentinians not only started a fight at the end but then turned their backs on the Spanish team as they accepted their awards.

If anything, you’d hope young athletes could learn good sportsmanship from watching a professional international sporting event.  Sadly, this was not one of those times. Their mothers should be embarrassed, unless of course, that's where they picked up the behavior.

As we left the stadium surrounded by singing fans wrapped in flags, I realized the World Cup hadn't introduced me to a different sports culture at all. It simply reminded me that every country has avid supporters who believe the referee is blind, the other team is cheating, and their side should've won.

The only difference between the youth baseball parents and the international soccer fandom of the World Cup Finals is that they do their jeering in various languages and somehow… all of them end up sounding exactly the same.