Football is a country

November 16, 2015 1:12 PM

The Stade de France–A History in Fragments

Or did he, and the other players, make the same decision that many are now saying we should: that in the face of horror the only thing to do is to keep playing, moving, living? Watching it now – knowing all that we do about what happened Friday night in Paris – we can perhaps count it as one of the most surreal things to ever take place in this storied stadium, a place built nearly two decades ago specifically to house history.

posted by infini (4 comments total)

This is a great piece. (It borrows a bit on Dubois's Soccer Empire, which is definitely worth checking out.)
posted by asterix at 1:29 PM on November 16, 2015

Great piece! Its themes reminded me in a way of the autobiography of Romain Gary, a writer of many voices and histories. Which again reminded me how the Arabs and Africans of our time have so much in common with the Eastern European and Russian Jews of the 19th century.
All sharing a dream of France as a special and magical place of freedom and justice as well as equal opportunity.
posted by mumimor at 3:22 PM on November 16, 2015

Brilliant piece, thanks for sharing. Honestly, I've been quite pleasantly amazed as to how few the deaths have been, relatively speaking, at Stade de France. This piece puts Friday's heroics (in stopping the bomber, and the difficult, but correct, decision to continue the match) in quite a bit of sporting context that even I, a casual follower of football, can appreciate.
posted by the cydonian at 6:16 PM on November 16, 2015

The Stade de France was the first stadium that looked "Modern" - the first wave of post-Heysel and Hillsborough was just working with what already existed or just impressive but flawed endeavours (such as the Meazza or the Delle Alpi, which are quite unique but terrible to watch games from a number of seats, or the first stadium to be presente as such, the Amsterdam Arena, that looked incredibly aged just a few years after development). But the Stade de France just looked right as far as a multi-purpose stadium goes.

Unfortunately, these days all new top of the line stadiums look copied from one another. It's like they reached a formula and decided it was good enough.
posted by lmfsilva at 8:48 PM on November 16, 2015