Die-Hard Soccer Fans Find Fun Even in 3rd-Place Game
It seems somehow un-American-- two losers battling it out for third place. Just ask the scalpers outside the Rose Bowl before Saturday’s World Cup consolation round matchup between Bulgaria and Sweden.
“It’s brutal,” said one, hawking two $100 tickets for the price of one. “It’s got to be the worst game of the tournament.”
Adding insult to injury, as far as scalpers were concerned, was the nationality of the players. “It’s two no-name teams,” said the man pushing two for one. “How many Swedes are there in L.A.? Or Bulgarians?”
Well, actually there were quite a few Swedes, or at least Swedish partisans--dressed unmistakably in blue and yellow, often sporting blue-and-yellow plastic horns atop their heads (“for the Vikings.”)
And where there weren’t Swedes, there were Germans, Italians, English, Irish, Mexicans and more among the legions of fans from all over the world who converged on the Rose Bowl on Saturday morning.
“Some people say this game doesn’t matter, but it does matter,” Arla Terrell, who came from Thousand Oaks, her face painted completely blue and yellow in homage to the Swedish team, said beforehand. “It does matter in your heart. You know you’ve come in third in the whole world.”
In the United States, football and college basketball long ago nixed third-place games. But in World Cup soccer, it’s a tradition. “I know it’s not an American style for losers to play, but it’s always a pleasant game,” said Guido Tognoni, spokesman for FIFA, the soccer federation. “This is the only game of 52 games which can be played with pleasure and no pressure.”
Not only was the losing Bulgarian team compelled to play a consolation game, but members had to suffer the added indignity of schlepping all the way across the country from New York, where they last played, to the Rose Bowl--before heading back to the East Coast to travel home.
“They’re professional players, why shouldn’t they do it?” said Tognoni, unmoved. “FIFA pays $500,000 per team per appearance. So this is not bad money just to make a five-hour flight.”
In fact, the third-place game, as Tognoni describes it, is far from the exercise in pointlessness and humiliation that some might judge it to be. It’s often a display of virtuosity.
“Four years ago, the (third place) game was between Italy and England, and it was the most beautiful match of the tournament,” Tognoni said.
Although the score of Saturday’s game wound up being 4-0 Sweden, many soccer fans had expected a good match between the Swedes and Bulgaria, precisely because no championship was at issue. “They don’t have anything to be on edge about,” said David Driver, 46, of Murrieta, with his soccer-playing 16-year-old daughter, Zara, in tow.
The beauty of the third-place game is something you usually don’t hear discussed in American sports. If it’s not for first place, no one wants to watch it, let alone dissect the finer plays.
Even in the Olympics--where third place means the difference between a bronze medal and nothing--mustering the motivation can be difficult.
When the U.S. Olympic water polo team went to the 1992 Games gunning for the gold they had narrowly missed winning in two previous Games, they ended up losing again and playing for the bronze.
“They didn’t care--to put it bluntly,” said Bruce Wigo, executive director of U.S. Water Polo Inc., which oversees water polo competition in this country.
But certainly the soccer fans Saturday were not indifferent about the prospect of two defeated teams going at it for less than first place.
“We follow the Swedish team all the way,” said Niklas Ivenholt, a Swede who has been tailing his team around the United States on its World Cup odyssey. For his efforts, he has a sunburned nose and new friends from Sweden whom he met at the World Cup games. Like him, they were philosophical and full of national pride about Sweden’s appearance in the consolation game.
“We weren’t expecting we would go so far,” said Klas Andersson. “So this is a big success.”
