RORY MCILROY HAS just contrived to lose the US Open and the journalists in the Gelsenkirchen media centre can no longer ignore the outside world and so we must plot a way home.
We are well aware of the chaos outside. Tens of thousands of fans have been stuck in a queue in the lashing rain, waiting for a tram back to the city centre and the main train station.
It is only a 7km journey back to the train station, but, incredibly, the only way back is via the tram. You could walk back, but the road from which you can start walking back is accessible only via the walkway to the tram station…so you have to queue either way.
We have heard seductive whispers about mysterious shuttle buses, about which there are no signs and nobody working at the stadium seems to know. We find a bus filled with Uefa folk and ask for a lift back to Gelsenkirchen. The Uefa guy fixes us with a gaze and tells us, I’m sorry, but we only care about our bus to Dortmund.
And so we set out to walk the 7km back, only to find the tram queues have finally dwindled and we squeeze onto a carriage in which we all hear the beery-breathed soundtrack to the tournament so far.
So much for German efficiency…
Euro 2024 is proving to be one of the great national myth-shattering events of the century, with fans realising that the German train service – the Deutsche Bahn – is on the verge of collapse.
Like thousands of others, I’ve based myself in Dusseldorf on the blessedly naive assumption that games in Gelsenkirchen, Koln, and Dortmund are easily commutable via Germany’s famous train service.
Getting trains is a kind of white-knuckle, Darwinian event: you need the stamina to endure the endless and unpredictable delays and then the strength to simply surge onto whatever train you need. Things like seat reservations are quaint aspirations: on the Deutsche Bahn, it is eat or be eaten. Perhaps this in some way explains Germans’ occasionally brusque manner: on the trains it’s dash to a seat and then a case of head down in exquisite ignorance lest anyone try to move you.
Fans’ biggest issues so far have been getting back to central train stations, with most stadiums built a few miles from city centres. This hit what everyone hopes is a nadir in Gelsenkirchen on Sunday night, with the primary means of ferrying 61,000 fans back to town a set of 400-person trams that ran every 15 minutes. You can do the maths on this. It’s like trying to empty a lake with a thimble.
It took fans almost three hours to make the 7km journey back to town, where they were met by chaos at central station. Fans rushed from platform to platform like a game of Super Mario, looking for the right train in the absence of anyone trying to help. Then came the mass crowding of the platform and the surge onto the train, which was distressing for kids in particular.
Gelsenkirchen is dysfunctional, and yet it hosts Spain-Italy later this week and England’s last-16 tie if they win their group. Delivering this news to England fans on the trains home was to be met with faces of sudden, dawning horror.
There is fault here with Uefa, who strictly police the commercial and branding elements of these tournaments, but are happy to hand off the transport and logistics parts to the local organising committee. Proof once again that, to Uefa, travelling fans don’t really matter, or at least are not afforded the dignity they deserve.
..although we should have seen this coming
The locals knew this would happen, of course, given that the system has been officially described by the German audit office as being in “permacrisis”, and is losing roughly €5 million a day. The reason for this has been a chronic lack of investment: Germany has invested only 2.5% of GDP in transport infrastructure since 2018, which is lower than all of the other major western economies. Different provinces have had different levels of investment, so the situation in Berlin, for instance, does not appear as profoundly bad as in the Rhineland.
Germany have lowered their own headroom to invest in infrastructure projects, with their “debt brake” – which limits the amount of new debt the government can take on each year to just 0.35% of GDP. It reflects the national attitude to spending: generally Germans are big savers, and it’s why they are broadly more open to spending massive deposits on houses to avoid being lumped with a large mortgage.
This is partly a psychological overhang from the insane inflation of the Weimar Republic, when the decision to print money caused an inflationary spiral that is hard to comprehend. To take one completely mad example given by the historian Neil MacGregor: by the end of 1918, the cost of an egg was five hundred thousand million times more than it had been at the start of the year.
Deflated egos
Kylian Mbappe’s isn’t the only nose out of joint in the Rhineland. Some locals in Gelsenkirchen have been deeply offended by the reviews of their city by the travelling England supporters. One news outlet latched onto a tweet from an England fan calling the place a “shit hole”, which happily introduced us to the German for the word, Drechsloch.
Meanwhile, the top Google News result for Gelsenkirchen ahead of kick-off against England was an on-air digression by Sky Sports reporter Kaveh Solhekol, pointing out in mild complaint that the restaurant he and his colleagues were in did not take card, adding – not unreasonably – that “there’s not really much left in Gelsenkirchen.”
Beneath the headline, “England presenter makes fun of Gelsenkirchen”, BILD deemed this a “devastating verdict”, and a subsequent editorial in BILD told Solhekol to “Take THAT you blasphemer”, explaining the city has a popular zoo and accentuating Schalke’s massive support base in claiming, “In your England, my Gelsenkirchen would be a pearl among the cities.”
This really would be an exceptional tournament for fans if they didn’t have to actually get to and from matches. The atmosphere in city centres has been fantastic, and Dusseldorf is a melting pot of fans from various countries whose matches involve criss-crossing the region.
Germany does create a supporter vibe that is pretty hard to match anywhere else, and it’s founded on two principles. The first is that, regardless of where you are or when you are there, you should always be able to get a beer. The second is the general expectation that you drink that beer, and then come back for more. After schlepping a couple of miles back to Dusseldorf city centre after France/Austria last night, a couple of colleagues and I bought a beer each in an off licence, with the man behind the till fixing us with a look of mild disgust. Only one? Amateurs.
Food for thought
A lot of the fan banter has thus far been focused on food, with banners among crowds claiming how their cuisine is superior to their opponents. A sign reading Fondue better than Goulash was spotted among the Swiss fans in their game against Hungary, for instance.
Meanwhile on the streets, there has been the theatrical snapping of food: Albanian fans snapped packets of spaghetti in front of Italian fans, while Austrian fans did likewise with baguettes in front of French supporters.
Which raises the question: what could opposition fans snap in front of Irish fans if we had qualified? Is there anything? Or is our national cuisine among the least snappable in Europe?
Mad as hell
Some tempers are snapping too. Portuguese journalist Nuno Pereira was reporting outside the team hotel when he managed to get himself involved in a scuffle with some young fans around him, lacing one with a kick. He has since ended up in hospital with a dislocated shoulder.
Jornalista da @SICNoticias Nuno Pereira interrompe directo para agredir ao pontapé (e soco) um miúdo que tinha gritado alto perto do microfone.
— James (@James_MartinsJR) June 17, 2024
Espero que os pais do miúdo dêem seguimento ao processo por crime de ofensa à integridade física. pic.twitter.com/suGnRCcvN1
One way to beat the traffic
One England fan managed to avoid the travel chaos in Gelsenkirchen on Sunday night: he passed out at the stadium and woke up at 4am, alone and in an empty, locked stadium.
