Last Wednesday we spent a fun April evening at the huge Stade De Geneve (Geneva Stadium) where we watched the local soccer team called the Servette FC play against the FC Saint Gallen. FC stands for “football club”, which makes sense once you realize that what we’ve been calling soccer in the US is more commonly known by the rest of the world as football. And from what I can tell, American football is not very big over here… instead they have rugby, which is basically the same sport, but without all the protective gear and more blood and guts 
The stadium was mostly empty that night despite being able to hold 30,000 spectators. I don’t know if this was due to the game being on a weeknight, but I sorta suspect it’s because our team is not very good. The lack of crowd attendance also meant that the cameraman who was responsible for filming “atmosphere” shots of people for broadcast TV ended up filming everyone in the place at least once. Indeed, my dreams of having our faces projected on a huge stadium jumbo-tron were finally realized. C’est la vie!
As I mentioned, I don’t think our team is very good. In fact, we lost. Not too badly, but the final score was 4 to 1. My favorite part, of course, was when we scored our only goal by heading the ball into the net past their goalie.. the place lit up, the jumbo-tron screens were filled with all sorts of crazy soccer animations, and of course, the announcer screamed out “GOOOOOOAAAALLLLL!!!!!!” for about thirty seconds on the loudspeakers. It was awesome. When the other team scored (four times), I’m not even sure if they acknowledged it at all. Pretty funny.
Speaking of the other team, those guys had traveled all the way across Switzerland and brought the craziest group of fans with them. There were maybe a hundred visiting fans all sitting in one corner of the stands, and they were literally belting out fight songs throughout the ENTIRE game. Shirtless mostly. At one point someone shot off a huge smoking flare gun, and then they fired something like a cannon causing an enormous BOOM! in the stadium. Seriously, they were just nuts and relentless.
All that said, it was extremely cool to see a European soccer game, and it reminded me of how much I enjoyed playing the sport growing up!
View all Servette FC Soccer Game pics!
PS. Sorry for the grainy pics, they’re from my camera phone!
Paula, you got your hair cut! I like it! : ) Love you!
This is great! I think of dad when I hear the whole “”GOOOAALL” being shout out. When Amy and I were kids he used to say “SHHOOOOT” From across the field. Hilarious stuff!! It must of been awesome to see a professional game like this.