Three nothing
I got curious one day about soccer. I know Marseille’s team is a big deal; I know they play during winter. So I looked up their schedule, and found that they were playing Paris Saint-Germain that weekend. Hmm. Marseille is the second largest city in France. Paris is the largest city in France. Paris Saint-Germain is known in the soccer world for hoovering up excellent talent; Messi, Mbappé, and Neymar all play for them. Names that you know. The literal world champion. The literal #2. I wonder if Marseille & Paris have a rivalry?
Friends, Marseille & Paris have a rivalry. Their rivalry is large enough to be itself named. Their rivalry is fierce enough that there is a sizeable tab on their Wikipedia page titled “Violent incidents”. And so I bought the dip one day before the match, and found myself with a ticket to probably the single biggest sporting event in France in 2023.
To get the actual sports out of the way: Marseille got their asses kicked. At home. In the eighth largest stadium in Europe, in the largest crowd that had ever seen a Ligue 1 game. Messi scored his 700th ever club goal. Mbappé tied PSG’s all-time scoring record. A funereal energy settled over the stadium around minute 24, and despite the continued roar of pyrotechnics it never quite lifted.
None of this matters to me. I had an amazing time. I came into this thinking: all that really matters is the human dimension of it. Marseille is, uh, outmatched. I get to see some of the most iconic names in soccer history play live. (Neymar had a sprained ankle, and didn’t travel to Marseille with the rest of the team.) Meanwhile, soccer is a minor religion in this country, and especially in this city. This was worth my time & attention, on my final weekend in France.
You’re an impartial observer of something that is both illegible and massive; you’ll never understand it, but it clearly matters to a lot of people. You just show up and take the scene in. Witness. I didn’t say anything the whole time.
Before I even showed up to the first line of security, multiple explosions went off near me; people would light off fireworks all evening, through the game, audible in the stadium. Road flares were visible in the horizon – and then in the stands, after Mbappé scored for the second time. There was a grid of flashbangs at one point, filling the whole stadium with smoke. At the beginning, one end raised a tifo of Marseille’s biggest landmarks. 67,000 people basically just yelled the whole time. Entire sections of 15,000+ people would wave blue & white semaphore flags in unison. At one point, there was a decibel meter on the video board.
Again: all of this was for a game that we lost horribly.
The Vélodrome is sort of cordoned into 4 large stands, perpendicular to one another. The end stands have all the hooligans waving semaphore flags, chanting to each other, and setting off road flares, like you do. To the sides was everybody else, including me. I sat next to a couple of solo fans, and in front of a bunch of teens, ostensibly there with family. One of them just took pics and posted to Snapchat the whole time. And I looked around and thought yeah, this is kind of it.
I almost didn’t go. The day before, I texted the biggest soccer nerd I know, and laid out my quandary. It was expensive. It would be cold. Rain was forecasted. I’d have to upend my schedule at the last minute, on my last weekend night in town. She said:
I don’t know if I can ever justify going to Europe without going to a soccer game again. PSG is like seeing the Dream Team and the Yankees and BTS all in one experience, it’s just incomparable to anything we have in America
And:
No sport here can compare, people just /care/ in such quality and quality
And the kicker:
You cannot have any similar experience on American soil, which I’m assuming is kind of the point of going to france for a while to begin with
And she was right. There’s nothing like this in America. Not only do we profoundly not care about soccer, we also don’t care about any sport to the same degree. Sports-wise, I’ve seen Michael Jordan in the NBA Finals, I’ve been to UNC’s major basketball rivalries, I’ve been to over a dozen instances of the oldest rivalry in American professional sports, and I’ve watched the Cubs go deep in October. Nothing compared to this. Nothing could match the passion of this. I’m going to go back to the States and think that every sports game I ever go to is quiet. I’m going to somehow think a newly sped-up baseball is boring. What a gift.