Victory In Europe? The Champions League, The Christmas Market, War, And Brexit
Finding your way in a strange city has got easier with apps, but even they can let you down in urban areas where the closeness of buildings confuses the software. I was a little late. My flight had been on time; the car I had booked had turned up; but I had not realized that the Zagreb Christmas market was such a tourist draw–and the traffic into town had been very heavy.
I was in the Croatian capital to watch Manchester City, the team I had supported since my 1970s boyhood, play Dinamo Zagreb in the Champions League.
Feeling At Home At An Away Game
Soon I knew I was heading the right way. I saw the signs familiar to every football fan–at least in northern and eastern Europe–that a stadium was nearby, and it was matchday: groups of men, some with shaven heads, some with scarves, drinking pot after pot of lager, and lining their stomachs with fried or grilled street food.
Once, looking for Anderlecht’s stadium, it had been a street full of pubs and chip vans that had told me I was near. Here, it was hot dogs and vast grills of kebabs. The stadium lights glowed upwards in the dark December sky.
There was a beer ban for the away supporters, though. Those of us travelling to Zagreb had been sent an email that morning from Manchester City Supporter Services warning us that anyone trying to enter the stadium after drinking more than half a unit of alcohol risked being ‘taken into police custody.’
Looking at the line of strongly-built, heavily-armoured, riot police at the entrance to the away section of the stadium, it was not a prospect anyone fancied. A couple of fellow fans whose path I had crossed on the way to the stadium had obviously thought it worth the risk. They told a tale of a long afternoon in a city centre pub where the locals had treated them to drinks. There was no trouble, though. The police line made a gap for us to file through. I soon found the friends I was looking for–they had travelled the day before–and we made our way to the stand.
Memories Of Soviet-era Soccer
As a student in the late 1980s, and as a young TV producer in the early 1990s, I watched a few matches in the last years of the Soviet Union. The away end of the Dinamo stadium took me back to football behind the iron curtain: a cold concrete terrace with tiny plastic seats that offered little comfort with temperatures around freezing.
So we stood–as we normally would at an away game, anyway. City had little to play for. They were assured of finishing top of the group–and, despite conceding an early goal, won comfortably, 4-1.
We few hundred frozen fans clapped our team from the field, and stamped our feet to keep them warm. Having been kept in the stadium long enough to keep us from meeting Dinamo’s ‘Bad Blue Boys’–we had seen their banner at the opposite end of the stadium–we were allowed to leave and join the queue for the trams back to the city centre.
British Political Divisions Have An Away Day
Here there was a reminder of bitter political divisions at home. I spent my schooldays in Manchester, hence my loyalty to City. Manchester is deeply divided between red and blue in football–but here City fans argued amongst themselves about the U.K. general election the following day.
The row–which, as I remember, focused on the competence or otherwise of Jeremy Corbyn (then leader of the British Labour Party) and the callousness of the Conservatives (the growing number of foodbanks in Britain given as evidence)–was short lived, and followed by a gloomy silence falling on the tram queue.
We headed into town. Some of us went to find a bar. Two friends and I stayed at the Christmas market to warm ourselves with a cup of the hot gin they sold there. The gin itself was not hot–at least, not to begin with. It was added in a generous slug to a cup of mulled wine. Soon our feet were cold no more.
War In A Museum
Our flight home was not until the late afternoon. The next morning, after excellent coffee in a friendly café, we visited Zagreb’s War Photography Museum.
‘The past provides us with the lessons about the catastrophe of war that we must not forget’ says its website. And while I had wondered whenever I saw in the street a man of about my age (I am in my mid-fifties) what he had been doing in the Yugoslavia’s civil wars of the early 1990s, it seemed that much of this was news to later generations.
The woman working at the museum (too young herself, I guessed, to remember much of the 1990s) spoke of how little younger people knew of what had happened before they were born. What they did know seemed to lack any of the perspectives of their enemies. So perhaps the museum has its work cut out as it seeks to stop people forgetting the lessons of the catastrophe of war.
One image in particular unsettled me. I don’t have the copyright to post it here, so if you are ever in Zagreb, do visit the museum. It shows the aftermath of a 1995 Serbian attack on the Croatian capital, carried out, the museum panel has it as ‘an act of retaliation.’
A woman in a raincoat–she might have been on her way to work, or to the shops–lies face down on a city centre pavement, her mouth gaping in undignified death. Behind is a stopped tram–from which she might just have alighted at just the wrong time–very similar to the one my friends and I had taken back from the stadium the night before.
A few hours later, I was back home in London where, shortly after voting had ended, it was clear that the Conservative Party had won big in the election. It was no victory for me. Three-and-a-half years earlier, I had voted for the U.K. to remain in the European Union.
I had not hoped that defeat could be reversed, but the election victory for Boris Johnson’s brand of Tory party promised the hardest of all Brexits (and it still looks that way now).
I had managed to see my beloved City play away in the Champions League, and win. I had also enjoyed Europe as I had come to know it in my lifetime: visa-free travel to the rest of the continent, visiting cities to watch sport, or visit museums, or countless other things across a continent at peace.
‘War belongs in a museum’ says the notebook I bought as a souvenir. May it stay there. That would be a real victory in Europe–but as I look at those of my compatriots relishing the political battles we now have with our neighbours, I remember the corpse in the raincoat, and wonder how widely that is understood.
All text and photos © James Rodgers, 2020
You can see a version of the photograph (in this one the woman’s face has been obscured) on the Politika Plus website.