FC Köln: Fighting Icelandic Volcanoes One Football Club At A Time.

A quick flick to the news this weekend and you probably heard about the Icelandic volcano currently spewing its uninvited material all over global airspace. Planes are down, people are down and spirits are down. It’s affected football quite a bit, too, as Barca are being forced to read this post on a bus via mobile rather than on a laptop at their cushy Catalan casas as they make the trek to Milan for tomorrow’s Champions League extravaganza.

While many are forced into rerouted or halted travel, Cologne did everything possible to combat that mean ol’ Mother Nature and make being stranded as enjoyable a fate as possible. When they played Bochum on Friday, they opened the doors to anyone grounded at the city airport: show an airline ticket in return for a free football ticket.

46,000 showed up, which you’d think would’ve made this a wild success.

It wasn’t. (Well, not unless you count the 2-0 win.)

Cologne averages 48,000 per match in a stadium which seats 50,000 and, according to official numbers, they’d only ripped less than 46,000 stubs twice in the last five months: once in a heavy loss to Stuttgart in February, and once in a heavy win against Nurnberg on December 20th, a win which also happened to occur during a blinding fury of white – Christmas.

So a hearty round of applause for both Köln & Cologne, but one which serves as a cautionary tale that no good deed goes unpunished.

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Category: Bundesliga