Getty Image
Hoooooo buddy. Thought there could be nothing weirder to watch than sports with no fans? Think again folks because sports with no fans with cut-out replacements in their seats instead is far creepier. I don’t know about y’all, but I find being replaced by the background characters in FIFA to be arguably worse than being replaced by a clone or a cyborg. I’d much rather be a victim of an Illuminati cloning farm (please don’t kill me guys) or the eventual technological uprising than simply be printed out of a barely-functioning printer at the local FedEx Kinkos. If this is the way we’re headed, I want out of the simulation. Morpheus, please, any day now my guy.
Apparently not Borussia Monchengladbach fans in Germany, though, as they’ve reportedly paid to have cardboard cut-outs of themselves placed in their seats, so that if Bundesliga football matches do resume without fans, at least… pieces of cheap paper will be there instead? Who fuckin’ knows, man. People are well and truly losing their shit. I’ve been joking to my roommates that quarantine has been allowing white people to be white as hell — baking bread, playing music out of their windows, making shitty paintings whilst drinking wine, listening to their record players, going hiking, etc — and this move by Gladbach is merely the latest example of that (I’m guilty of this as well, don’t even ask me how much Witcher 3 I’ve been playing).
Getty Image
Getty Image
Getty Image
“Hey everyone! Didn’t already feel like we were living in a dystopia? Let’s turn our lives into a living fucking FIFA game. We’re gonna start pumping crowd noise into the stadium through the speakers. You can be at the game without being at the game!” As they say in the soccer community, we’re proper fucked, lads.
***
Eric is a New York City-based writer who still isn’t quite sure how he’s allowed to have this much fun for a living and will tell anyone who listens that Gotham City is canonically in New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter @eric_ital for movie and soccer takes or contact him eric@brobible.com