“In the U.S., go to almost any professional sporting event and look in the stands — just about everyone sits. But at soccer matches throughout the world, many fans prefer to stand.”
“The tradition of standing is so entrenched that games like Tuesday’s UEFA Champions League semifinal at London’s Emirates stadium often elicit battles between ticket-holders who want to stay on their feet and security guards who want them to relax a little.
In fact until the 1990s, stadiums in England included large standing terraces where spectators were treated like cattle. In America, however, custom and shouting have always kept people down in front at big-time baseball or basketball games.
“I don’t see myself going to watch a game and sitting down,” says Oscar Zambrana, a Bolivian-American in Virginia who runs the D.C. United supporters’ group, La Barra Brava. “To me sitting down is kind of boring.”
To explain the gulf in fan behavior, historians point to everything from labor laws to gender roles to cultural expectations.
It goes back to “the middle ages, when the nobility sat and the common plebs stood,” says Rod Sheard, senior principle of the leading sports architecture firm Populous and designer of the Emirates. “All of America is nobility. Everyone thinks they’re king in America.”
Indeed, 19th-century baseball fans in the U.S. quickly developed higher standards for comfort than British soccer fans, says Steven Riess, author of “Sport in Industrial America, 1850-1920.” “I think there was a sense of entitlement for American leisure clients that they didn’t have in Europe.”
British soccer developed very differently. The clubs, some of which were started by workers from the Thames Ironworks (West Ham United) and the Woolwich Arsenal (Royal Arsenal), were usually partnerships controlled by local directors, not entrepreneurial owners, and the games were held on Saturday afternoons when laborers were given a half-day off.
The early stadiums were designed to pack in as many fans as possible and were far from luxurious. Many of them were designed by one man, Archibald Leitch, a Scottish architect who cut his teeth building factories. Mr. Leitch’s Stamford Bridge, the site of Wednesday’s Champions League semifinal, had only 500 seats when it opened for soccer in 1905, but it had room for 90,000 standing. (It maintained standing sections until 1994.)
“The working class in the 19th century and 20th century,” says Gary Armstrong, who studies sports sociology at Brunel University in London, “didn’t have a great deal of expectations about public facilities. They’d go from working in a coal mine or a factory to standing up often in an inch of mud in the winter.”
In Britain, shoddy conditions soon became integral to the fan experience. Fans flocked to the big matches partly for the pleasure of being uncomfortable together. At the 1923 FA Cup final, some 200,000 spectators packed into the new Wembley Stadium, which had seats for about 35,000.”
Image via WSJ
