Football, Free movement: the future? A Bratislava Away Day
Tehelné Pole, Bratislava, Slovakia before the start of Slovan Bratislava vs Manchester City, 1 October 2024
This post is overdue. I am finishing my next book–on Russia and the West–ahead of publication next year so I have had less time than usual for this site, and other journalism. But a trip last month to Slovakia–the first time I had been there–fed both my love of football, and my fascination with European politics and history.
FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY I have supported the same football team, Manchester City. In recent years, that has meant the chance to watch them play in Europe more than ever in their history. It also gives me and their other supporters an extra reason to see new cities. In the case of those of us who grew up during the last decades of the Cold War, it includes places that once lay on the other side of a Europe divided by ideology and fortifications.
In December last year, I wrote about my trip to Belgrade. This October, I travelled to Slovakia to watch City play Slovan Bratislava. The friend I was travelling with and I had discovered that we could get to Bratislava by boat from Vienna. We arranged to meet in the Austrian capital the day before the match, and sail down the Danube on the morning of the game.
‘War belongs in the Museum.’ The wall of the Museum of Military History, Vienna, Austria. 30 September 2024.
I spent the afternoon in Vienna walking the city’s elegant streets, and visiting the Museum of Military History. I saw there the car in which the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was travelling when he was assassinated in Sarajevo in June 1914. His killing led to the outbreak of the First World War, the first of two colossal conflicts to scar European history in the last century.
The second of those, from 1939-1945, left Europe divided between communism and capitalism. The location of the city I was in, Vienna, meant it became a nest of spies seeking intelligence on their Cold War rivals. The city I was to travel to the next day, Bratislava, had in that era been part of Czechoslovakia–and, until the revolutions of 1989, in the communist camp.
So the boat trip to Bratislava the next day was not only a novelty–in 50 years of watching football, I have never before sailed down the Danube to get to a match–it was also a privilege to be able to pass so easily through what in my childhood had been a border between a Europe split in two.
On the river Danube between Vienna and Bratislava, 1 October 2024
The match was itself a broadening of European football’s horizons. An increased number of teams in this season’s UEFA Champions League means every side in the group stage of the competition plays four matches away from home. We might not otherwise have been on the road–or the river–to Bratislava.
The game stretched the definition of the word ‘match’. This was no meeting of sporting equals. City scored two goals in the first 15 minutes. From then on a comfortable victory was never in doubt. City eventually won 4-0. It was a straightforward win, but, as always, a joy for fans of my generation who will never tire of seeing our team triumph in Europe’s biggest competition. For so many years, nights such as these were an impossible dream.
I liked Bratislava, but even on a brief visit there were reminders of the country’s, and the continent’s, challenges. The stretch of the Danube along which we travelled had flooded, with deadly and devastating consequences, just two weeks before.
Slovakia’s president, Robert Fico, survived an assassination attempt in May. The week after I was in Bratislava, he showed he had returned to full, fiery, health. He criticized journalists from the country’s main media organizations, calling them ‘bloodthirsty bastards’.
In a country where it is only a few years since the murders of the investigative journalist, Jan Kuciak, and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, verbal attacks echo with extra threat.
I heard a lot of Russian spoken on the streets of Bratislava, especially near the university, which was close to where I was staying. The language–whether spoken by Russians or Ukrainians, I did not stop the speakers to ask–was a reminder of the return of war to the continent.
So too was the window of the Ukrainian cultural centre.
The day after the match, we travelled back to Vienna by taxi. Our passports were checked at the border between Slovakia and Austria: checked, as we were British, that we had the required EU entry stamp. My passport, issued in 2017, still says ‘European Union’ on the cover, but is no longer good as a permit for permanent residence and work in Europe as once it was.
I no longer have that freedom, but I am still lucky enough to be able to travel in Europe largely as I like. I am still lucky enough to support a team that challenges at the top level of European football. But I have known times when neither was true, and my trip down the Danube reminded me I should take nothing for granted.