“We’re Up, You’re Down”: An Unusual and Awesome Day at Aston Villa Football Club

By Dr. Nauright

There’s much more to the Premier League than Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal who seem to dominate the headlines, and of course win the championships of recent years. There are several teams with historic success that have huge local, regional, national, and even global following. We were lucky to see two of those teams in action on Sunday, May 22.

That day the AIS was hosted by Aston Villa Football Club for the last Premier League match of the season at Villa Park. As Daniel mentioned I am rather partial to The Villa having followed them since 1980. It has been a few years since I was able to get to Villa Park for a match so naturally I was excited to be there. Villa exceeded themselves, however.

For those of you who don’t know, Aston Villa Football Club is in Birmingham, England. It was founded as a program of the local Methodist church in 1874. It’s leader, William Macgregor founded the English Football League in 1888. Villa was the dominant club of the next 15 years and continued to be successful periodically after that. Villa won the Football League championship in 1980-81 and followed that up with victory in the European Cup (now Champions League) in the 1981-82 season, becoming only one of four English clubs to win the title along with Manchester United, Liverpool and I’ll bet some of you didn’t know the fourth – Nottingham Forest.

Villa finished second in the first season of the Premier League and was sixth the past three seasons before this one. The club is owned by Randy Lerner who also owns the Cleveland Browns. This season was a bit of a struggle, but with an away victory over Arsenal the week before, Villa was assured of avoiding relegation. Villa’s two biggest rivals, however, were fighting for their life on the last day, most notably the hated Birmingham City.

We had a behind the scenes tour, sat on the players’ bench, and learned how a Premier League match operates. Then we were invited into the season ticket holders pub/restaurant in the old Holte Hotel next to the ground (stadium). The Holte End is the stand where the hard-core fans – the ones who sing and chant the most – sit. We then found our seats with perfect sight lines of the whole field and opposite the Liverpool fans. There were some 3,000 there for Liverpool and they certainly made themselves heard, singing constantly during the match. Indeed, Liverpool, I must confess, probably have the most vocal support.

What was really strange was that the Villa supporters were rather quieter than usual and largely ignored the Merseysiders’ singing. Why? Because, for the first half of the match and then some, Birmingham City was ahead in the battle to avoid relegation. Villa scored during the first half and this was greeted with delight. The stadium erupted, however, when Tottenham scored against City pushing them into the bottom three and into a relegation position. The 40,000 Villa fans all stood up chanting “We’re Up, You’re Down” and other shall we say less savory chants. Then Birmingham equalized and the mood changed again. All the sudden we heard “C’mon you Spurs” as the Villa crowd urged on Tottenham, just in case the sound carried the 90 miles or so down to London. In other words, the majority of effort by the home fans had nothing to do with either team playing at Villa Park on the day! Not sure that would ever happen in the States. After a dramatic end in which the battle was unclear, Wolverhampton Wanderers (Wolves) narrowly escaped, while Birmingham, to the delight of the Villa fans, was relegated to a lower league along with Blackpool and West Ham.

For its part, Villa, 1-0 winners, finished the season a respectable 9^th in the League while Liverpool ended up 6^th. Not a bad to end the season for Villa with wins against Arsenal and Liverpool. I am excited to have helped create several new Villa supporters, but the real thanks goes to the Aston Villa staff, fans, and players. Our students were well looked after by a club that prides itself on local engagement and community. I confess that to see Villa defeat Liverpool for the first time since 1998 was also pretty special.

And while the world is a huge place, it can be a small world too! On the way home, I ran into one of our former American Model of Sport students from Denmark, Jacob Madsen, who was also at the match (though he was supporting Liverpool as do many people in Scandinavia).

This weekend the students will get a new global soccer experience watching the Champions League Final between Barcelona and Manchester United from Estonia. Meanwhile, we have arrived in Finland greeted this morning with beautiful sunshine and we have twenty hours of daylight! It is hard to beat Europe in the summertime especially at the beginning and end of summer when there is good soccer to be found as well!