I went to Manchester United’s Football Club yesterday – Old Trafford. It was my first time, and it was A-MAZ-ING. Loved it. Yup. Loved it. L-O-V-E. Got it?
Although, when the fans started shouting over and over again – LOVE UNITED, HATE THE GLAZERS….I shrank a bit. The Glazers are the American owners…I kept my accent at a minimum. I couldn’t help but feel a bit personally embarrassed for my fellow countryman. But, then I got over it and into the game.
Going to the nation’s largest Premier League football stadium, and still feeling like I was an integral part of something meant something. It meant I wasn’t just a seat in a stadium…which is what the protesters wearing the green and yellow scarves were trying to say. They were trying to say to the American Glazer family, who own the football club, that it is the fans and the city that make this football club what it is – it’s not a franchise, as the Glazer’s mistakenly said during a conference about the club, and you can’t expect to get the football club into £700 million debt without a fight from the fans. You can’t raise ticket prices so high that people who have lived in the city for decades and been season ticket holders just as long, can no longer afford to go. This isn’t America, they’re trying to say.
It also shows to me the advantages of living in a smaller country can do. It makes you feel like you are actually a part of a community. This is the nation’s largest Premier League football stadium (thank you Sam for correcting me – Wembley is the largest football stadium at 90,000), and it only holds 76,000 people. My college football stadium at USC held 93,000 seats, and that’s college! I was three rows from the field, and there was Wayne Rooney, the white Pele, literally 30 feet from me. Amazing. Although, as Jock pointed out to me, the Super Bowl stadium in Miami holds the same amount of people – so perhaps it’s the fact that you’re so close to the field. In America, they put the seats far back, so even the best seats in the house are far away.
It makes you feel less lost being in a smaller country. It makes me realize why it’s so easy in America to feel lost, like just a number and searching for your place in the enormous country. It makes me understand why there are so many Americans buying self-help books, going to enlightenment seminars, and healing conferences. It also shows me how the English can scoff so easily at our seemingly pathetic attempts at “finding ourselves.” But it’s no wonder…if you went to a high school with 5,000 other people, you’d probably feel a little lost as well. The English have a built-in community. It’s not hard to feel recognized here…the numbers themselves are on your side. But it’s more than that, they build things out of a need for something. They don’t (or should I say didn’t) build things for purely financial reasons, for capitalism…football teams here came out of a community of people who wanted to get together and kick a ball around. (Click here for Man Utd’s history. Of course, now people would argue that the footballers make so much money that they only play for the money, but I disagree…I think most of them would still play even if they got paid a fraction of what they earn now.) But, the history alone builds soul (although I’m sure the English wouldn’t go so far as to use the word soul, but I will because I’m a cheese dick American.)
I think I may have understood before how, culturally, it’s easy for Americans to be in constant search of their identity (afterall, we have the biggest melange of cultures possibly known to man, without one truly of our own), but I don’t think I had ever really thought of it in terms of events and numbers. Yes, the English have a much stronger sense of identity because their culture goes back hundreds of years, and therefore is more easily embedded in their sense of self, but when you go to a sporting event and you can honestly say that you experienced it rather than just simply being a spectator…that says something else. This may sound like – DUH! to others, but to me, it’s a truly AH HA moment.
I felt very American on more than one occasion last night, but the moment when I felt the most American was when I was leaving the stadium. One of the security guards looked at me, laughed and said “I’d recognize those earrings anywhere, hey!” I laughed out of politeness, not really sure what he was going on about, and continued on my way. Then he said, “Hey, Bette!” as if that would help me comprehend his joke. I just continued laughing and moving away from the strange man in the neon yellow vest. Jock looked at me and said, “You have no clue what he was talking about, did you?” “Not really,” I responded, “I assumed he meant Bette Midler or something?” He replied, “No, he was comparing you and your earrings to Bet Gilroy from Coronation Street.” I had these big hoop earrings in.
I’m still not entirely sure what the connection is, but I’m glad he got a good chuckle out of it. Besides, these are people who have never heard of Full House, Family Matters or Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? (A friend of mine, Katie, informed me of this when she found out her English fiance had never heard of these shows.)
So, what is the moral of the story?
What good is a small country when you can’t watch the hits that started the careers of the Olsen Twins?
And, if you want to watch my American cheese-dick video that I made, see below!
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