Bad Supporter Behavior and Other Bummers
I woke up feeling completely better, once I took a hot shower and cleared out my sinuses. I went back to a coffee house that I’d gone to a few days earlier for breakfast before heading southeast on the Underground for my next match
Today brought my final match of the trip, with some high stakes. Chelsea WFC would be hosting FC Barcelona Femení at Stamford Bridge, and Chelsea needed to win by at least four goals, after losing the first leg of the tie 4-1 in Barcelona, to avoid being knocked out by Barça in the semi-finals of the UWCL…again. It was not looking good, but if I had to bet on anyone in the world to beat the Barça women by four goals, Chelsea would be my first choice.
Barça, for context, are the most giant of giants in the women’s game right now. They have only lost a handful of matches in as many years: three in the last three seasons, five since 2019, if my stats are correct. Last season, they won every competition they were in: La Liga F, Copa de la Reina, Supercopa, and UWCL. They regularly defeat teams by five or more goals, and this season they’ve scored 107 goals, while only allowing sixteen. So the stakes were high for Chelsea, but the odds were even steeper.
Before I get to Stamford Bridge, let me take a moment to tell you about what else is happening in London today:
As I mentioned yesterday, we’ve got the other match of the FA Cup semi-finals, between Nottingham Forest and Manchester City. As I may not have mentioned, from the semi-finals on, all the matches occur in London, at Wembley Stadium. Which means an influx of about 70,000 people down from Nottingham in the midlands and Manchester in the north.
Thankfully for the National Rail staff, the Manchester trains will be arriving at Euston and the Nottingham trains at King’s Cross. This actually happened for the previous match as well, with Crystal Palace largely being locals, who would use the Thameslink from St Pancras, and Aston Villa fans coming into Euston from Birmingham. This was all dumb luck this year, and I cannot imagine what the trains are like when these matches end up being local derbies like last year’s final between Manchester United against Manchester City.
In addition to the FA Cup clash, there is also the London Marathon today. I’m not sure how many people this brings into the streets of the capital, but the report I read said over 56,000 ran, and I saw a lot of people walking around wearing medals throughout the day, all over the city, each with an entourage of supporters, so I’m going to wager the answer is: many.
It was a bit fun, the contrast between the nearly 100,000 people who were here to sit and watch 44 athletes–22 in the FA Cup, 22 in the UWCL–versus the 56,000 people there to be athletes themselves.
Given all that, the train to Stamford Bridge did not seem as crowded as the one to Arsenal the previous week, but according to the reports, there were just under three thousand more people in attendance, at 23,573. The atmosphere was a little excited, but a little muted. Even the superfan Basil seemed a little less hyped than normal.
You can be optimistic and realistic: best case scenario was a hard battle to four goals while conceding zero. I joined the very confusing queue to get in, which started to wrap in on itself and then, ultimately, broke down into a very un-British chaos, but I got in and got to my seat only a few minutes before kick off.
Something that I really appreciate about football in Europe is that they generally keep the supporters of each team segregated. It might seem odd to a sports fan from the US, where seats are allocated by who pays the most, and nothing more, but it really does a lot for the atmosphere and experience, as a home and away supporter. I’m sure it also helps with safety as well, that’s probably the primary reason, but it’s nice to know, home or away, if your team succeeds, everyone around you will celebrate with you.
Which is why it was so odd to see that, while I’d passed almost as many Barça shirts as Chelsea shirts on the way in, the section that was clearly for Barça supporters was pretty small, and wasn’t full. The reason became clear soon after, as multiple people in Barça shirts started to filter into seats around my section. I’m not going to rant about this too much, but just understand that it was disrespectful of them to buy tickets claiming to be Chelsea fans, and then show up in Barça shirts.
At kickoff, Chelsea started strong, both defensively and offensively, but each passing minute without a goal only increased the tension and desperation in the crowd. We had been given those terrible poster-noise-makers that they had at the Man City match, and I can confirm that they encourage lazy clapping. And migraines.
Just under a half hour into the match, a break-away from Barça’s Aitana Bonmatí, the Ballon d’Or winner for 2024. The Chelsea defense could not keep up, and she slotted it past the keeper, Hannah Hampton, with ease. This was when I learned that the disrespectful Barça fans were not just in my section, but scattered around the stadium. Dear reader: if you ever get to go to a European football match, do not do this. If you must support the team opposing the section where you are sitting, do it quietly, inside your head.
Remember my first match of the journey? I was watching Manchester United. They are my second-least-favorite English team, and easily in the top ten of least favorite teams around the world. But I’m not an asshole, so I cheered with my seats.
I’m a fucking Barça Femení fan1 and I was cheering for Chelsea. It’s not that hard! These Barça fans? They’re assholes and they should be ashamed of themselves.
Sorry, I said I wasn’t going to rant that much. I’m done, I swear. IT JUST REALLY GRINDS MY GEARS.
Around 40 minutes, I started to think “Okay, if we can just get into the halftime break without any further goals…” and then Barça scored. And then again two minutes later. Honestly, the tie was over. I wanted to be optimistic, I wanted to see a comeback like Manchester United had pulled off, but Chelsea just weren’t playing like champions, and Barça were.
At the half, I went to get my tea, and in the queue I spoke with a pair of women behind me about what seemed off. One of them noted that the whole back line looked gassed, and the other one mentioned that Hampton looked lost. I couldn’t argue with either of those points. Meanwhile, on the attacking side, Mayra Ramírez never once looked threatening. Every question she asked, Barça had an answer for. Probably the brightest player from Chelsea was Lucy Bronze, but I’m kind of obsessed with her, so I might be biased.
Sonia Bompastor made a couple of changes at the half, including taking off Ramírez, and I was hopeful, for about three minutes. But Chelsea just could not make anything happen. Chelsea’s bench is stacked, the kind of team where an opponent might be relieved to see a powerful player subbed off, only to sweat when they see who’s replacing them.
The wild thing about Barça is that their bench makes Chelsea’s look solidly mid. They started making substitutions themselves, and every new player just knocked my hope down a little bit more. Oh, are you relieved to see Norwegian-great Caroline Graham Hansen subbed off? Well, here comes World Cup winner Salma Paralluelo to replace her. And so on for literally every substitution.
Chelsea kept trying, to their credit. The most positive thing I can say is that I never felt like they’d given up, even after most of the supporters had. Salma scored one more for Barça at the end of regular time, but Chelsea pulled one back at the beginning of stoppage time and, weirdly, there was a ripple of hope in the stadium…even though there was literally only a minute of play remaining.
Chelsea got two promising corners in a row, and, with the third one about to be taken, the match official signaled for the end of the match. By the reaction in the crowd, you would have thought that Chelsea only needed one goal, not six. But that was it, a repeat of last year’s elimination for Chelsea, but in a much more brutal manner, but six goals instead of just one.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned the toilet situation in all these stadiums. Scroll to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know. If you aren’t familiar with me, I’m trans, and personally, the only part of my transition that I regret is that I now have to use the men’s rooms. It’s bad enough in the States, but these stadium toilets are something else. There’s normally only one or two stalls, and then there aren't any urinals, exactly. Instead, it’s just…a big trough. I’m going to spare you any more details, but let me just say, more than once, I considered taking the UK TERFs up on their suggestion that I use the women’s restroom. Anyway, at least the line was much shorter.
I also haven’t mentioned that I hate walking in crowds. It makes me nervous because I come from America where crowds and mass-shootings go together like peanut butter and jelly. But also I get quickly impatient with the way crowds amble and meander. So all these matches have been interesting because you know what you do at football matches other than watch football? Walk in crowds.
The crowd leaving the stadium was particularly meandery, which only got worse when the crowd seemed to just stop still. There was someone at the very front of the pack with a megaphone, saying something I’m sure was very important. I have no idea what. After waiting as long as I could handle it – about 8 seconds – I turned around, found an empty-ish area to think about my options to get back to my hotel.
I love a good walk, but it was going to be a 2 hour walk, which is on the high end of my tolerance. I knew that the closest Underground station would be closed post-match – that was my guess what the megaphone person was saying – so I could walk to another one, but both directions were blocked by big crowds.
Then I noticed the electric bike next to me said “10 free minutes a day.” I’d never taken an electric bike, but I figured I could at least get away from the crowds within 10 minutes. So I downloaded the app, rented my bike, and headed north. After approximately three seconds, I understood why my parents’ city was trying to ban these things on the walking paths. It had some real get-up and I quickly found myself at Kensington Gardens. I briefly considered being touristy, but the migraine that was building in my head said otherwise, so I hopped on the Underground and headed back to my hotel for one last sleep in England.
Results on the day:
Nottingham Forest 0-2 Man City, City qualify for the FA Cup final against Crystal Palace
Chelsea WFC 1-4 FC Barcelona Femení (2-8 on aggregate), Barça qualify for the UWCL final
Lyon 1-4 Arsenal (3-5 on aggregate), Arsenal will join Barça in Lisbon on May 24th
London Marathon: lots of people survived, I did not have to run, we all win
Count:
10 matches
11 full days
11 train services
36 trains
I support the Barça men only in instances where they play Real Madrid. ↩