Diary / Jonathan Wilson / 15 June 2008 / Leave a comment

Jonathan Wilson has a good old rant about fan zones and the cynical commercialism of football that they represent. Oh, and he met Hansi Muller and asked him about losing to Austria in the European Championships thirty years ago.

Maybe I'm getting old, maybe I'm just a grumpy git, but can anybody explain to me the attraction of fan zones? I was in Innsbruck last night for Spain's game against Sweden, and that means the magnificent media lounge, where they ply journalists with free booze and wine in the belief we'll say nice things about the Tirol. (Just to fulfil any contractual obligation I may inadvertently have entered into: the Tirol is great. Visit it.)

I left at about half-past midnight for what should have been a ten-minute walk back to my hotel. Except that the fan zone was in the way. So it took about four times as long, fighting through a tightly-packed, beery, sweating throng. What were they doing there? When a game is being shown live on the giant screen, I just about get it, but hours afterwards?

In a city of dozens of pleasant bars, why would anybody willingly squeeze themselves into a sausage of humanity? It was so crowded it must have been difficult even to raise a drinking arm. The ground was so sticky with beer and God knows what else that each step involved peeling your shoe off the pavement with a great schchloooop. By the time I'd dragged my self through, bouncing off elbows and shoulders, it felt like I'd negotiated that pie-making machine in Chicken Run. And apparently people do this for pleasure. If hell, as Sartre said, is other people, then this was its inner circle.

And Spanish fans la-laing their way through their national anthem on a permanent loop doesn't make it any better. Doesn't it have any words? Given the recent revelations that, thanks to Franco's machinations, Cliff Richard was robbed of Eurovision in 1958 by a Spanish song called "La la la", it seems deliberately mocking.

The fan zones generally have had a bad press and seem not to be working. One stallholder I spoke to said he had paid 35,000 Euros for his site, but had no chance of making his money back, something he blamed largely on Uefa's decision to set a uniform pricing structure to ensure that all punters are ripped off equally. Three English friends of mine who are over for the tournament seemed not to mind paying a fraction over London prices for beer, but the Poles, the Croats and just about everybody else are objecting, and simply not buying anything. There is even talk of a stallholders' strike, which frankly seems a touch hypocritical from people who bought franchises in the grand corporate Euro rip-off.

I've banged on here before about the infantilisation of fandom, about the embarrassing Simon Says competitions and the ridiculous fan-speakers from each country who try to whip the crowd into an ersatz frenzy, and the fan zones are just another example of the way the whole experience is being corporatised. In Germany the fan-zones were a great success, an innovative way of allowing those without tickets to watch games and still feel part of the tournament, but here they have become dreadful plastic shams. Almost by definition, once you're older than about three and have stopped playing among the brightly-coloured balls at garden-centres, a "designated fun zone" is not going to be fun.

By contrast, the media lounge remains magnificent. There was no Haddaway last night, but there was Hansi Muller, the former Germany midfielder, who is now an ambassador for Tirol. (It's great, by the way. Visit it.) To his evident frustration, he has been besieged in recent days by journalists asking for his memories of what is known locally simply as "Cordoba".

Austria must beat Germany in Vienna tomorrow night if they are to confound expectations and reach the quarter-finals, which has reawakened memories not of Spain in 1982 and the disgraceful game in which Austria acquiesced in a 1-0 defeat to West Germany that saw both through at the expense of Algeria, but of the match in Argentina four years earlier. Then, already eliminated, they beat West Germany 3-2 with an 88th-minute Hans Krankl goal to deny them a place in the semi-final. "No, I can talk about it," said Muller, who came on as a half-time substitute. "I don't mind talking about it at all." His teeth were clearly gritted, though, and he managed to steer the conversation onto other topics - mainly how good the Tirol is. Visit it.

Tags: Euro 2008 fan zones, Germany Euro 2008, Hansi Muller