Every four years, the globe stops spinning as the 32 best national soccer teams come together to face off in the month-long World Cup Tournament. Currently, the world's gaze stands transfixed on Germany, where the opening round of the 2006 World Cup is coming to an end Friday. By this weekend, only 16 teams will remain alive and the intensity will be ratcheted up.
Round robin group play began June 9th and the championship game will be played July 9th at Berlin's historic Olympic Stadium. Most Americans have interacted with the World Cup solely through the lenses of ABC Sports and ESPN, which are broadcasting all 64 games of tournament. Several Virginia students, however, are currently in Germany and have been able to experience World Cup fever up close and personal.
One such student is sophomore Yannick Reyering, a German native. Reyering, who led the Virginia men's soccer team with 14 goals in 2005, lives in Mettingen, a small town located between Hamburg and Hannover in northern Germany. Like many other Germans, Reyering is ecstatic about the opportunity to witness the World Cup firsthand.
"It is absolutely amazing here in Germany right now," Reyering said. "It has never been this way before."
Reyering won tickets to a first round playoff game through a contest. The playoff rounds begin this weekend. Reyering said he watched nearly all of the opening round group play games on television.
"I usually watch the games with a lot of my friends in front of huge public screens in Osnabrück or other big cities," Reyering said. "The win over Poland [Germany defeated Poland 1-0 June 14] was absolutely insane. I watched it with almost all my friends and about 5000 other people. When Oliver Neuville scored the goal, people went crazy. We partied the whole night, not only Germans together but also Polish fans, so that was really cool."
This is the third major global sporting event hosted by Germany since World War II and the first since East and West Germany reunified in 1990. West Germany hosted and won the 1974 World Cup while the 1972 Summer Olympics were held in Munich. Overt patriotic displays have long been considered taboo in Germany due to the nation's complicated history but Reyering said that that is changing.
"There are flags hanging out the houses everywhere, which is totally unusual here," Reyering said. "There has never been this patriotism before. Like Christoph Metzelder [a defender on the German team] said, it was time for this patriotism to finally emerge and it pushes the German players enormously."
Germany, however, is not the only team that Reyering is pulling for. He has also kept a close eye on the U.S. team. Two American players, Claudio Reyna and Ben Olsen, are former Cavaliers and U.S. coach Bruce Arena won five national championships during his reign in Charlottesville from 1978 through 1995.
"I watched the U.S. game against Italy with my friends at home and I put American flags everywhere," Reyering said.
Rising fourth-year Virginia student Gabe Germanow is also in Europe this summer. His tickets, which he got through the U.S. Soccer web site, will only be good if the U.S. advances out of the opening round of play. The U.S. must defeat Ghana today and Italy must defeat the Czech Republic if the Americans hope to advance to the playoff rounds for the second straight World Cup.
"The World Cup is the planet's most popular sporting event, bar none," Germanow said. "The Olympics don't even come close. I was recently sitting in a pub in Bergen, Norway where full-fledged Norwegians were dressed in complete England and Sweden gear just to watch their respective games on television. The place was packed in the middle of the day and Norway wasn't even playing."
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