Frankfurt fiesta and the Rising Pig
The public viewing area in Frankfurt provides a 144 square meter screen to fans on both the north and south banks of the Main river. (If you don't have a conversion program handy, that's over 1,550 square feet.)
There are lots of teams are getting good support here—some friends and I who attended South Korea/Togo on Tuesday estimated that 25,000 Korea fans made it into the Frankfurt stadium for that match—but there's nothing to compare with the enthusiasm that the host country is showing for their team. Two different places I visited for last night's Germany/Poland thriller show the depth of the German fans' support.
The first is the public viewing area in Frankfurt, part of which you see pictured above. The centerpiece is an enormous TV screen floating in the middle of the Main. There are temporary bleachers set up on both the north and south banks of the river and they were overflowing last night. Past them, people were standing on the road above the riverbanks and past that, on the doorsteps of the commercial buildings fronting the river. The fans you saw here were the same as you would find at the match itself—wearing German team gear from head to toe, face paint, and all the accessories you would associate with a hard core fan. The number of people who attended to watch Germany/Poland was amazing—we arrived two hours before game time and decided to go somewhere else because it was already too crowded.
We ended up in a small, modern bar with an upscale menu and a nice rear-projection screen that was big enough to be seen from anywhere in the room. The place gradually filled up and we even had to share our table with two German women who provided some good conversation about the team and even answered a question that I had been wondering about for weeks: What does "Schweinsteiger" translate to in English? "Schwein," of course, is pig, as anyone who has looked at even one German restaurant menu will be able to confirm. They explained that "steiger" meant "something going up," so we settled on "Rising Pig" as a concise translation of the German midfielder's last name.
Here's the thing about the crowd at the bar, though. There were only one or two Germany shirts among the 50 or so people there and only a couple of people had any sort of noisemakers or face paint. But everyone there knew German soccer songs; everyone knew the "clap clap/clap clap clap/clap clap clap clap/Deutschland!" cheer. They didn't sing or do organized cheers very often, but when called upon, they knew how to participate.
We as Americans are usually a bit too hard on ourselves in our self-critique of our soccer culture. Europe has had a 100+ year head start and their sporting landscape is not nearly as varied as ours. But when people who show no outward signs of fandom drinking and watching the match in an upscale bar are starting traditional football songs and everyone else is joining in, it's hard not to think that you'd never see such a scene in the U.S., at least not now.