Wonderwall: On Soccer, Stadiums, and Mortality
On May 29, 1985, my father saved me from death by soccer. In fact, he did the life-saving a few days prior, in altogether non-dramatic fashion, when, over dinner, he forbade me from attending the European Champions' Cup Final between Juventus and Liverpool at the Heizel Stadium in Brussels. As a result, I wasn't among the 39 who died there after an assault by Liverpool fans, followed by a stampede and a deadly crush in the section where I would have been.
My dad was the sports editor for a Belgian progressive daily. Soccer being the loosey-goosey operation that it was at the time, flashing his press credentials was all it took to have ticket takers wave me through stadium gates. Whether it was a mid-table, mid-season game in the Belgian league or a European cup final, I’d walk in as if my old man owned the place, no questions asked.
But a few days before that game, a dream final between two of world soccer’s absolute super powers, my dad announced he’d be keeping his press pass in his pocket. It was just too dangerous, he said. And no amount of begging and pleading would change his mind.
Soccer was an ugly game in 1980s Europe, played by ugly men, with ugly mullets and ugly little shorts, using ugly tactics, in ugly stadiums that were always on the verge of falling down. And if the game wasn’t ugly enough, the fans were always ready to tear each other’s throats out. My old man knew better than to leave me by myself between two of the most vicious hooligan clans in Europe.
I was no good at soccer, but that didn't mean I didn't try. I wanted to be a goalie and showed up to my first practice with the local team, Germinal, named after the harvest month on the French Revolutionary calendar, wearing a makeshift keeper jersey that was a ratty old sweatshirt with the progressive daily's logo on the front and a homemade number one ironed to the back. I got laughed off the pitch pretty much immediately. Soccer kids were mean little bastards. Even at the age of eleven, they didn’t let any trace of innocence go un-ridiculed.
In 1980s Europe, youth soccer’s first order of business was to break your spirit. If you wanted a chance to play for Germinal, you had to practice for many long months on a field that was so plowed-over that only the patches near the corner flags had a few blades of grass left. In my age group alone, there were 200 kids competing for spots on four teams. It drizzled every single practice, and it was always 43 degrees. I’d like to say the soundtrack was something by Joy Division, but you’d think our world was some kind of a Ken Loach movie, which it wasn’t. And there would always be a group of old guys watching us from the sidelines, chewing on skinny cigars, looking stern and saying things like, “Football? Ya can’t learn it. Ya either got it ‒ or ya don’t.”
Whether you had it or not didn’t make a lot of difference anyway, because all you were allowed to do was defend. We were Belgians, after all, and we didn’t have any delusions of grandeur. We played a realistic game, you see, not that crazy Total Football shit that the over-the-hill, post-Cruyff Dutch still thought they could pull off. Our game was meat-and-potatoes Catenaccio. We didn't believe we could win on any of the big stages, but we weren't going to lose easily either, and dammit, from time to time, we'd pull one out when you least expected it.
Even at ten or eleven, we were taught to dig in and take guys down, no questions asked. When the rare opportunity for a counter-attack finally presented itself, only the two or three kids who were deemed to have it were allowed to go for goal. If anybody else dared to dribble or shoot, they’d get yelled at.
I wore that number one jersey only once and played just one season. A couple of years later, within spitting distance of puberty, I switched to basketball, where you’d actually get yelled at for not shooting the ball.
Soccer was just mean. Not just physical and competitive, but just plain nasty. I'm talking pinch-a-guy-in-the-balls-in-a-schoolyard-pickup-game-type nasty. Always-whine-at-the-ref-and-try-to-get-somebody-sent-off-type nasty. Plant-your-cleats-in-your-opponent's-ankles-and-then-drop-down-to-the-pitch-screaming-and- moaning-as-if- you-were-just-victimized-type nasty. They did it in the pro game, they did it at Germinal’s muddy acres, and they did it in recess pick-up game at school. Little kids would cut you down with the cold-hearted malice of a grizzled veteran playing for his last contract and nobody would bat an eyelash about it.
As maddening as that nastiness was, the game and the places it was played always had a certain mystique. Germinal, an ambitious up-and-comer in the regional leagues when I had trudged around its potato field of a pitch, had worked its way up the Belgian soccer pyramid, all the way to First Division. Baffled neighbors saw the club add rickety stands to its tiny stadium every year as the crowds got bigger, until the place eventually held 15,000 or so.
Predictably, some of the neighbors formed a committee to shut it all down because they didn't like the ruckus and the people parking on their block, but in 1980s Belgium, you couldn't go up against a community whose soccer club had just made the First Division.
I was no stranger to those kinds of facilities. Beginning when I was five or six years old, my dad used to take me to see the various teams he covered, and I had seen my share of baffling architectural choices.
At one ground, belonging to a club named SK Lierse, a neighbor had used leftover scaffolding to build a 60-foot makeshift observation tower in his backyard, so he could see over one of the stands and watch the game for free. At the beginning of each half, you could see him scampering perilously up the ladder affixed vertically to the outside of the structure. Soccer is a winter sport in most of Europe, so he had to undertake that climb in wind, rain, and occasionally also ice and snow. Strangely, I never heard of him falling to his death.
At KSK Beveren, one of the main stands stopped dead cold in the middle of the field, because that’s where a local lumber yard had its warehouse. Beveren had a number of spectacular seasons in those days, playing ‒ and, more than once, beating ‒ giants of world soccer like Inter Milan and FC Barcelona at its tiny home ground, but never managed to buy out the lumber yard.
Another club, FC Liège, played at Rocourt, a stadium that actually did make sense as an architectural unit, but also had a cycling track around the field. The crowd was so far away from the action that the players could hardly hear it above the sounds of their own voices and cleats hitting balls bouncing off the velodrome. I knew a guy who was good enough to play there and even he hated the place with a passion.
Before generic seating bowls became the platonic ideal of any sports facility around the world, Belgian grounds had their flood lights affixed to masts in the four corners, where the separate stands met. When I was old enough to accompany him to night games, my dad would build up the excitement by telling me then players would have four shadows.
The Heizel Stadium in Brussels was a symmetrical bowl, but an old and dilapidated one. The building had opened its doors in 1930, and through the combination of decay and misbegotten renovations the stadium had undergone since, you could see ancient Greek design principles at work. A perfect oval here, a couple of faux-Doric Pillars there ‒ this was a building from the same era as Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Stadium, but conceived with Latin laissez-faire instead of Teutonic severity. It was The Triumph of the Will meets the half-life of concrete, plus some hastily slapped-up concessions and a new grandstand done on the cheap for good measure.
But boy, did players ever have four shadows at the Heizel. Among the other additions to the stadium throughout the decades were floodlights mounted on steel poles the size of thousand-year-old Redwoods. They lit up many a legendary night on the pitch. Like the night Belgium dispatched Brazil 5-1 in 1963. True, Pélé didn’t make it to Brussels for that match, but it was still peak Brazil, riding high on its 1962 world title. The lighting was impressive, worthy of the European dream final between Liverpool and Juventus.
I had seen many games from the Heizel Stadium’s Section Z, where the pre-game massacre happened on that night in 1985. Belgian cup finals, national team matches, you name it. The section, a crumbling terrace that sloped up lazily from the running track surrounding the pitch, was located next to the main stand, which housed the press box. My dad would drop me off at the gate, do the thing with his press pass, and tell me to come meet him at the media entrance after the game. Once inside, I would collect autographs and then sit in on the coaches' press conferences. It was a premium experience that I, as a bleary-eyed twelve-year-old who couldn't wait to get to bed, usually found rather boring. It just couldn’t stand up to the preceding hour and a half, witnessing the action beneath those towering pilons bathing the game in the light of the good gods above.
That’s why, no matter how badly the game had treated me as a player and how dreary and downright depressing the whole sport could be in those years, no matter how much I drifted off into basketball and later into hip-hop, graffiti and night clubs, and no matter how much the challenges of puberty, divorce, and an alcoholic stepmother alienated me from my dad in the years that would follow, whenever he said, “Do you want to go to the game?”, whichever the stadium, I’d be there.
There was nothing like the anticipation of the walk up to a stadium, the crowds getting thicker with fans leaking out of every bar and every little parking lot you passed. The crispness of the air after a rain shower, seeing that incandescent halo of water vapor rising up from the pitch under the floodlights from afar. Walking up into the stands and getting your first glimpse of that magical green rectangle. Old friends would greet each other all around you as the terraces filled up.
But most of all, it was the way a real soccer stadium sounds. That electric buzz. The rise in the crowd when a chant spreads from the kop to envelop all four quadrants. Because of how the speed of sounds correlates to the relatively large size of a soccer pitch, a full stadium can carry a perfectly synchronized chant only for so long. But when it happens, at the right time, there’s nothing like it. It’s a blue-collar Sufi experience, a yogi’s holy syllable that meets an outdoor rave.
What keeps you coming back is the collective jolt of excitement that hits you when you see that perfectly apportioned pass cracking open a play with the kind of swift ruthlessness that takes a split-second to register before it brings you and everybody around you to their feet, gasping, filling their lungs with that crisp evening air, because you know: This is is it. In just one more second, that ball is going to hit the back of the net.
That’s the church of soccer. The sanctuary of life lived without reservations. Those fleeting times when sports lift you up and it's you and 20,000 close strangers having a brief moment of uninhibited collective insanity. And when you walk out of the arena, you look at each other and you know: You and I and all of us together have had an experience tonight and we're coming back for more. In fact, we'll pay good money and have our hearts broken by these greedy sports clubs time and time again, year after year, just in the hopes of being together again and feeling this feeling again and reliving this experience just one more time.
When my dad had a massive heart attack, they put him on ice. That’s what happens in modern heart medicine, we learned. Doctors will induce hypothermia after a cardiac arrest to minimize the chance of brain damage from acute oxygen deprivation. Much like an interstellar traveler in a sci-fi flick, they put the patient in suspended animation, however uncertain arrival at the next destination may be.
I had hit my early forties by that time, living half a world away with my American wife and my American children, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. After two decades of awkwardness, my old man and I had finally made amends. Some of that had to do with grandchildren softening him up. The other part was that my massively self-destructive, alcoholic stepmother, who had long since left the scene, had finally kicked the bucket, prompting us to have the honest talk we should have had years prior. It was still awkward, but at least it was honest.
I was directed to get on a plane and come say my goodbyes. For ten days or so, we’d had hopes that my dad would make it, but ice bath or not, his brain was wrecked. I don't think my family ever actually asked for my permission to take him off life support before I could make it home; it wasn't mine to give anyway, but I do remember giving it regardless. Don't keep the poor guy's body alive so I can have the obligatory movie goodbye scene, I said, delivering the line I knew would be expected of me in the movie of my life.
Shortly before my dad’s death, I had started going to Minnesota United soccer games with my oldest son, Max. The Loons played in Blaine at the time, 45 minutes north of the Twin Cities, at the old National Sports Center stadium, where they often drew upwards of 10,000 spectators.
The first time we pulled up to the facility, I wasn't expecting much. It’s America, after all. They don’t even call it football here. We were in the deep burbs. It would be fun for the kid, but how good can it really be? I had my reservations.
But as soon as we started walking towards the stadium from the parking lot, something primeval awakened in me. It was that same anticipation. That same flood-lit dome of water vapor hanging over that glistening green rectangle you knew was there, but just couldn't see yet, because it was obscured by an improvised, cobbled-together mass of crumbling old stands and temporary bleachers. We walked up to our seats and it was that familiar first glimpse of the pitch, the smell of wet grass, the referee crew making its rounds to check nets and corners flags.
In a split second I was eight again, and I realized my son wasn’t even eight yet and if we did this just a few more times, some of his earliest memories of the good old days with his dad would be the same as mine.
I bought Max a scarf and got one for myself as well. We ate a hamburger from a food truck. When we started feeling cold by halftime, we decided that we really needed some Minnesota United hats. I happily sprung for just the one he wanted and got myself the same. We were a father and son falling in love with their team. One solid half of lower-division football was all it took.
Max was a promising little soccer player. He had a mean left foot and the scorer's instinct that I’d never had. By the time we made it to our first Minnesota United game, he’d been tearing up the neighborhood rec leagues for a few years.
A few years later, his little brother, Ben, turned out to be the same, though right-footed. And yes, that’s exciting stuff. You don't want to be the knucklehead sports dad, but let’s be honest: Who never had dreams of being really good at sports and playing at a big old stadium that would be packed to the gills? How many of us can’t help but relive those dreams at the first sign of athletic talent in their kids? You notice the spark in the little guys, you see them blowing past a few helpless, less coordinated kids and you think: “Could it be that my kid might, well uhm ‒, have it?”
My dad never saw either one of my children play organized soccer. He was a solid six-foot-one and had been a stodgy defender at the lower senior levels into his early twenties. Not a special talent by far, but he had also seen approximately a million soccer matches in his lifetime and even well into his sixties, it was clear he knew the game. He was full of nifty turns and pull-backs and he would drop his shoulder into you in a way that made it almost impossible to dispossess him around that big frame of his.
He was a changed man by the time he had grandchildren. He had a new wife, who smoked skinny cigars, made sure he took his vitamins, and made him happy. He'd show up to my house with a baby blue soccer outfit for Max and bring one for himself, too. He wasn't afraid to look silly, as long as it amused the grandkids. Reveled in it, in fact.
I'd find him mowing my lawn and setting up our fold-up soccer goals, so he could kick balls around with Ben and Max while his wife cheered all of them on from the porch. "Mastery over the ball" was his mantra. "You control the ball, it doesn't control you." All the things he’d never been able to teach me, his grandkids just ate up.
Then, his ass was on ice and that was it.
Crushed, I drove my kid out to see soccer in the burbs again. Sitting in those rickety stands, under those floodlights, thinking of all the nights driving out to tiny towns around Belgium with my old man, I reflected on how fleeting these moments really are.
As a kid growing up, it feels like it’s your job to cut the umbilical time and time again. Some, like me, end up living continents away. And even if I had stayed, my own children would have never had it like I had. The interposition of time, and physical distance, and foreign culture makes the rupture that much more palpable. All of us are adrift, but that night I felt even less tethered, trying to figure out what it all meant, as we do after a big loss. Holding on to this little boy who was busy making the memories that he’d remember me by one day.
Max and I would always sit in the section adjacent to the Dark Clouds, Minnesota United’s most prominent supporters’ group. We loved the chants and the drums and the smoke. We listened as they sang in unison the 1990s Oasis song “Wonderwall” after each win.
It was all wonderfully quirky. Hundreds of dudes (they were mostly dudes) were trying to replicate European soccer fan culture as closely as they could. But why would this collection of odd souls from St. Paul, Minneapolis, and the surrounding townships march to a match from the adjacent parking lot in a suburban soccer park in Blaine, Minnesota, as if they were in Newcastle or Birmingham? Why would you want to replicate what was done in the 1980s by a bunch of mulleted, old-world savages, who'd kill 39 people over a ball game? It was a bunch of beer-fueled brawn, but the beer was high craft vintage, not cheap lager, and the brawn wasn’t backed up by the very real threat of a near-fatal ass-kicking, the way it often still is in Europe.
In any case, we were falling hard for our team. The familiarity of the whole experience felt like a comfortable blanket to me. Max got his quality time with his old man and something told us this little team was special. You looked at the guy next to you and you knew that someday, you’d start a story with, “We were there at the National Sports Center, way back when...” Pretty soon, we knew “Wonderwall” and belted it out, word for word.
When Minnesota United was granted its Major League Soccer franchise in 2016, I wasn't hoping for much by way of a stadium. MLS teams would either play in oversized American football arenas or something called a soccer-specific stadium, which usually denoted a cheaper version of the generic sports bowl, often inexplicably open on one side, or with a built-in stage where third-string country bands could play during off-season tractor pull events and things of that nature.
I was safely assuming that Minnesota United would build one of those. In the spirit of 1980s Belgian soccer, I wasn’t getting my hopes up. We wouldn’t have a nice facility like people in New York or Los Angeles, but that was OK, because at least we’d get to play in the big leagues. If we did our best, we might even end up not looking silly. (This was, of course, also a very Minnesota way to feel about it.) On top of that, we’d spend our first two years as a struggling expansion team at the University of Minnesota’s woefully oversized TCF Bank Stadium.
I was blown away some months later, when the team presented the design for its MLS stadium. It was a bowl, alright, but it would be wrapped like a flying saucer made of translucent plastic, lit up from the inside by thousands of color-shifting LEDs, just like Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena. That meant it was the real deal. And it would be built just a mile from my house.
It was also asymmetric. Atop the lower bowl sat three distinctive, differently shaped stands. The roof covering one end was lower than it was on the other three sides. The stadium only had a huge video board on one side, complemented by an analogue, old-school scoreboard on the other. The whole building had the sleek look of the newer soccer stadiums you see built for every World Cup or European Championship, but it also evoked the improvised nature of many old-school European grounds. If you wanted to see a replay on the big board and you were on the wrong side of the stadium, you’d have to crane your neck ‒ and that was just perfect.
Every time I had an excuse, I’d make a detour past the construction site with my kids in the backseat, so we could see the stadium rise up from the ground, girder by girder. In the meantime, we’d watch the Loons play at TCF Bank Stadium, savored the few occasions we had to sing “Wonderwall” in those early days, but agreed the new place would be so much better.
And it was. But I didn’t realize why until it hit me in the face: the first time we walked into the stadium for a real game, the 2019 season opener against New York City FC. What made Allianz Field the real deal wasn’t so much the translucent roof structure, the steeply graded, asymmetric stands with their perfect sightlines, or the fact that Minnesota had even managed to snag the same naming rights sponsor as Bayern. It was the buzz. This place sounded like a real soccer venue.
We didn’t have to wait for a goal or even for the first whistle to know it. As soon as we came through the door, we were enveloped in it. No other sport sounds like it and not every soccer venue does. But this place produced that electric hum before a single ball was kicked. It was nothing short of exhilarating.
I instantly wished my dad could have lived long enough for me to take him here. I probably wouldn’t have had the words, because without his passing, I wouldn’t have done the thinking. But we would have sat there together, eating fries, basking in the flying saucer’s glow and taking in that buzz propagating itself at the inimitable frequency of football like a yogi’s holy syllable. Mind you, I know that if I had said this out loud to my old man, he would have thought I’d lost my marbles. “Yogi? Holy syllable? Get a grip, man. Why don’t you just watch the game? And how about some more fries?”
My kids and I saw that first game from the lower bowl, all the way across from the standing-room-only supporters’ section, because those were the tickets we were able to get for that sold-out opener. But the next time, we were back in our preferred spot: high up in the grandstand, right next to the supporters’ section, to take in the match at maximum volume. It took a few tries, but when we finally got to sing “Wonderwall,” it was beautiful.
I bought way too many tickets that year, keeping my kids up way too late, way too many times, and dragging along every friend who showed even a marginal interest, just to be able to sing the song and be with 20,000 close friends and buzz communally on that special football frequency and reassure myself that the line of time and space and home and family and love and loss would keep making sense.
On March 15, 2020, my time had come to save my own sons from death by soccer. We had finally bought season tickets for those seats high up in the grandstand, right next to the Dark Clouds. The Loons had won the first two games of the year on the road and we were very much ready to sing “Wonderwall.” But in the week preceding that home opener, the novel coronavirus gained ground across the United States, spreading fear and uncertainty. For days, I vacillated: attend this game we felt an almost physical longing for or leave our new seats unoccupied? It was probably just too dangerous, I told my kids. In the end, the decision was taken out of my hands. Major League Soccer suspended its season less than 48 hours before the game, depriving me the chance to make an unpopular, though heroic call of my own, 35 years after my father had wisely robbed me of the chance to see Liverpool play Juventus in Brussels.
In many ways, a pandemic is the opposite of a soccer match. Instead of a ritualized war game where the real sustaining motive is to give grown men an excuse to fall in each other’s arms and spill beer and forget their inhibitions, it’s a psychological death trap that does nothing but build new inhibitions. It has us proclaiming that we’re all in this together, but in reality, it makes every other individual an enemy. It ruthlessly cuts us off from the next man, knowing that one breath from anybody can mean a slow, agonizing, oxygen-deprived, death. It breaks the buzz and distorts the frequency like few other things can. It makes you look at your children ‒ your dead father’s grandchildren ‒ and realize how easily the line of time and space and family and love can be cut.
There’s no saying when we’ll sing “Wonderwall” again or even who will sing it. But it will happen, when crowds are safe again. And while there will be loss and there will be tears, we will be able to say we were there, and we were together, and hopefully that never happens again ‒ and boy, did you see how Dotson hit that incredible banger from twenty yards out? Sheesh! Ya can’t learn that. Ya either got it ‒ or ya don’t.
Tom Vandyck grew up in Antwerp, Belgium, and lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He was once a rap star in his hometown, is a certified barbecue judge, and published the Dutch-language non-fiction book “Amerika zoals het is” (America As It Is) in 2011. Vandyck has two left feet, but at a young age, found out he’s better at basketball than soccer. Despite a respectable vertical leap, he was a foot too short and two steps too slow to make his skill set count at any decent level of play. Before he became a corporate communications guru, he was a journalist covering, among other things, the NBA and Major League Soccer for the same Belgian progressive daily where his father was once the sports editor.