A year and a half is a long time. Especially when your daily life revolves around around a “sun” of which you suddenly find yourself deprived. “Overnight, everything stopped, it was brutal! “, remembers Grégory Walter who, at 39, saw some of the country to follow his favorite club, the Racing Club de Strasbourg. “I had not missed an official Racing match since February 2003, explains the vice-president of the Supporters’ Federation – which brings together most of the Strasbourg groups -, also a member of the Ultra boys 90 since 2000. The pandemic, with the closing of the stadiums, interrupted this series. “ So seventeen years, eight months and twenty-four days without missing a single one of the 733 consecutive games played by Strasbourg.
Not all football fans in France have the same record, but they too have suffered from the same lack. Between the unfinished 2019-2020 season and the following one behind closed doors, the wait seemed as long as some padlocked meetings. Especially for ultras, who devote a large part of their life to their passion for a club, outdoors and at home, rain, shine or snow.
“Overnight, they tell you, ‘Don’t go to the stadium anymore.’ We have been going there for fifteen years ”, confesses Julien Jeanneteau. Seated in the hall of the Angers Sporting Club de l’Ouest futsal complex, next to the Raymond-Kopa stadium, the spokesperson for Magic Scop, a group of Angevin supporters, still struggles to believe that a pandemic has brought to light stop the entire planet and, with it, the little world of the stands.
Antipasse play extra time
So, when the Professional Football League (LFP) gave the green light for a resumption of the season in the presence of the supporters, the young man (34) had a little shock. “When we got back to the stadium, we initially had the impression of having lost all our bearings. “ His group had tried, the time of a match between the first two confinements, in the summer of 2020, to attend a meeting in respect of barrier gestures, with a mask. “It was totally impossible, it did not correspond to what being a supporter means”, he slips. Finally, like the other groups in France, they had chosen not to return to the stadium until they could “really” express themselves there. But hard to complain when the whole world has stopped going round.
Since the beginning of August 2021, despite the constraints of the health pass, the euphoria of finding the stands has prevailed in all stages. All over ? No. Some die-hards play overtime. In Montpellier, if the members of the Butte Paillade were able to meet after a year without seeing each other on the occasion of the resumption of the season, the ultras, formally opposed to the sanitary pass, refuse to return to the stands.
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