COLUMN: Amazing atmosphere

     European soccer never fails to fascinate me.

     On Sunday afternoon, I happened across a replay of a match played in Germany’s Bundesliga league, between Wolfsburg and Werder Bremen. (I totally forgot, until it was almost over, that there was also a big auto race going on that day).

     The match was between a pair of Bundesliga also-rans, sort of like an NBA game between, say, Philadelphia and Orlando.

     Unlike American professional leagues, however, games between lower teams have a special importance. If you finish in the bottom two of Bundesliga’s 18 teams, you are “relegated,” or dropped into the next level league, replaced by the top two teams in the lower league. It would be like last year’s Twins and Padres being dropped to Triple-A baseball for a season, replaced by the Nashville Sounds and Oklahoma City Dodgers of the Pacific Coast League.

     These were not among the top German teams. But to the capacity crowd, it might as well have been a game seven. Fans were standing, yelling, singing and chanting. It was loud, and it was almost non-stop.

     One song would end (Do these people have rehearsals?), and another would start right up. The song would fade, replaced by a roar of anticipation, whenever one team or the other approached the net. But when a save was made, or the ball was kicked out of bounds, the singing would start up again.

     It blew me away. I kept watching even though I didn’t really care who won, just to take in that atmosphere. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be there. And again, this was a match between teams that were 14^th and 15^th in their league.

     It makes me wonder if Major League Soccer in the U.S. comes anywhere close to replicating that atmosphere. I have heard that the fans in Seattle and Portland do similar chanting and singing, but it’s hard for me to imagine that it compares.

     I can think of two games I have attended in my life when the crowd noise was so overwhelming that it almost consumed me. In the 1980s, I was at an NHL playoff game – as the home team was about to take the ice – in which the crowd cheered so loud you couldn’t hear the public address announcer. Instead, they just put a message on the sign board: “Here they are….”

     The biggest one, though was when I attended Game Seven of the 1991 World Series in the Metrodome. When the winning run came across for the Twins, I truly thought the cheaply-built place was going to crumble.

     There are loud cheers at any U.S. sporting event, but in European soccer matches, it seems like it goes on the entire time.

     There’s a part of me that has the bucket list idea of going to a soccer match in England or some other European country, just to experience that. Have any of you done that?

     And if you have, what was it like to come back to the U.S. and go to a professional sports event? Was it remotely the same?