Futbol Storm

Saturday was an eventful day. You could feel it was the weekend. People everywhere, riding trams, making out, window shopping while the store was open. Typical Magyar day. The weather was the best part though. It was windy. Blustery. A storm was coming. The rain was just beyond the next hill. But this under current of warmth. That’s what made it special. As the biting wind slapped against my face, I hardly felt it. There was a warmth, humidity coating the air around me. You could almost see it. Light thunder dappled the senses. Or did it? It’s hard to tell what exactly was happening in the distance. But the clouds. Ominous. They were coming directly our way.

Sounds like the perfect weather for a futbol match.

Jaro teaches at one of the major soccer stadiums in Budapest. He teaches the owner of the local team in the ‘President’s Box’ located above the stadium. I guess Liverpool (of Great Britain) recently bought out the Magyar team. We’re still scratching our heads why. Anyway, he has a friend in there and she offered to give him three tickets so that he and two friends could come watch a match. It was (naturally) Szilvi and I.

Going to the match was a little surreal. The weather was already shaping up to be epic, and the three of us didn’t really know what to expect of the game. We had an idea about what the crowd would be doing, but not really the level of game play on field.

The first thing we noticed going over on the blue Metro line, was that everyone was clad in green shirts and green shoes and green jackets and green scarves. It took a genius to figure out that Fradi’s (the local Magyar football team) color was zöld (green). Everyone was pounding beers down, rollicking along with the rocking sway of the Soviet-built metro. There was this blonde girl from Virginia talking loudly about her special life next to us. Two Hungarian men (friends?) stood watching her, blank faces, listening. Jaro and I looked at each other. We knew what they wanted.

When the metro stopped at Nepliget, our stop, everyone got off, beer in hand. Jaro is bitching about forgetting beer. I’m watching the sky. And almost run smack into a cop, clad in big heavy looking riot gear. I look up, and they’re everywhere. Oh yeah. Riot police. Goes hand in hand with football. They’re standing around, smoking, shooting the shit, watching. One has a video camera trained on the drunk milling crowd around us. I want to go up and hug one of them, just to see what they do. I don’t though. That would just be stupid.

Jaro calls his friend with the tickets. Where is she? Oh yeah, she’s answering! We meet up with her in the front of the stadium, and I stay back for a second and watch Szilvi. I can tell. She doesn’t like her. Jealousy. It’s a bitch.

It takes us a while to get into the stadium. First we go in on one side, but this stadium isn’t like a stadium in the states. Maybe it’s a European thing, I don’t know, but this stadium is partitioned off into sections. Probably helps when the Magyars riot. So we have to go out and then all the way around on the other side of the block to get into the section our seats are in (nobody adheres to the seats, we just wanted to be in the right section damnit). The game has already started. We’ve got tapped beer in hand. Tastes like water. Actually I think this is water! I say. But I look up. I cant hear myself think. Someone behind me is heckling the football players. Both sides. Szilvi leans over and shouts into my ear, ‘He says they go fuck their mothers and have niggers for fathers and suck their own…’

Jesus. I always forget how non-pc the Magyars are.

Both teams are pretty bad. I’m not surprised. We find out later Fradi is in the second division. Before the game, Jaro was touting Fradi as the best of the first division. I was not impressed. It was like watching my team in early highschool. Ball handling skills were pretty good, but sometimes they just booted it into nothingness. It started sprinkling now and then. The light was grey, people were yelling, both teams were sucking. And then the cheerleaders came out.

This must be some job on the side for them, because they were just bad. My video doesn’t really capture it, because I honestly got bored with them after a few minutes, but you get a taste while watching. At one point, they picked up the smallest one and she did an airborne spread eagle in the direction of the crowd. Szilvi shoots me a smile. Somewhere in the crowd, an old man has keeled over.

Some time throughout the hullabaloo, I walked down into the bathroom. There is this guy, swaying and texting and swaying and watching me now and Christ I cant pee when someone is staring. So I just keep walking and he keeps staring, finger in mid-text, and I walk out the alternate entrance. Damn that guy was weird. The next men’s bathroom (right next door…which was weird honestly) had no strange men staring. Heaven.

The rest was filled with lots of swearing, heckling, screams, and cheers. Fradi won, but only because they were the ones who sucked less. They were playing a team from a small village even Szilvi hadn’t heard of. They were supposed to win.

One thing was sure. It was a cultural experience. Learning racist words in another language. Watching bad soccer. Dodging strange bathroom men.

And the rain was about to wash it all away.