By the time I finally made it to Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park (Westfalenstadion for the purists), I’d spent the best part of two decades talking about going.
Chances are, you’ve probably had the same conversation: someone mentions the Yellow Wall, someone else looks up flights, everyone agrees, and then another season passes. Now in my mid-thirties, I had finally made the short flight to Düsseldorf. An embarrassingly straightforward solution to something so high up on the bucket list.
The match itself began making itself known long before I reached the stadium. There were pockets of yellow and black gathered over pre-match beers, vocal Real Betis supporters with a presence from somewhere out of sight, and a sense of anticipation that makes even the journey to a ground an occasion.
By the time I was on the U-Bahn, I was already wondering whether I’d picked an especially good night to pop my Dortmund cherry. However a handful of locals I got chatting to suggested otherwise. This, apparently, was fairly standard.
There’s something pleasing about discovering that a place lives up to the version you’ve carried around in your head – and Dortmund comes with considerable expectations. You’ve seen the images, the videos, and heard people describe the atmosphere with an evangelical enthusiasm. Eventually, you start to wonder how much room there is left to be impressed. Then you walk inside.
Seeing the Yellow Wall for the first time reminded me, improbably, of seeing the Empire State Building or the Shard. An object so familiar from photographs suddenly acquires its proper dimensions, and you find yourself doing the very obvious thing of looking up with your mouth slightly open. Except this one sings as well.
Before kick-off, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” filled the ground. Once the match began, the noise kept coming, and I found myself watching the stand almost more than the football. There was its sheer scale, certainly, but also the thousands of individual gestures within it: arms raised, scarves held out, people giving themselves completely to what was happening on the pitch.
It’s easy, from England, to let Bayern Munich’s dominance wash over German football these days. But spend an evening in Dortmund and that starts to feel like a fairly limited way of understanding the place. There’s considerably more to a football culture than who ends up winning the league.
It’s also worth mentioning how present BVB felt across the city, too. Every few minutes, another flash of yellow and black.Taken individually, these were ordinary signs of support, but after a few hours, the cumulative effect was extraordinary. The club seemed to accompany people through their day, well before there was any football to actually watch.
For those of us arriving to tick something off a list, that’s worth remembering. The atmosphere we’ve travelled to experience is something other people have spent their lives contributing to. We get an evening inside it.
Last week, I wrote about new stadiums and whether they can ever really feel like home, and Dortmund made me think about how much we ask architecture to achieve. A steep stand and a roof that holds the noise can help enormously, but the people on that U-Bahn, and the city I’d walked through to reach them, were part of the stadium too, in a sense.
Signal Iduna Park – Westfalenstadion, if you prefer – is one of the most impressive grounds I’ve visited. Trying to reproduce what it feels like, though, would require rather more than the plans. I’d spent years saying I needed to go and leaving, I was thinking about when I could get back.