Sport Lisboa e Benfica - SLB and the idea behind mass hysteria over sports

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With more than 200.000 associates we are now THE biggest clubs in the world. Our history is full of sports achievements, but it is mainly football(soccer for some of you) that manages to pull fans all over to the stadium. We have a small stadium nowadays, only 65000 seats, but for a country with only 11 million inhabitants it's great that we manage to fill it up so many times! Most intelligent people would argue that being such a fan is irrational, I mean, what does it really matter to anyones happiness that there are 2 teams each with 22 players running around with a ball every week, and sometimes two times a week?! What kind of phenomenom makes it so important?!? So life altering?! Because there are people who alter all their lifes because of one match, they live for it, they breath it, they just love it! In 2004 Portugal hosted the Euro 2004, in record it was one of the most successful events of the kind, mostly because the whole country was behind it. In reality, for me it changed my view on football. Until then I saw it as an annoying thing, my father and most of the men would change the tv to watch the match and I HAD to endure it, it was only a game so why were they all worked up about? I was always a SLB fan, from birth I had no other alternative, not even just saying that I wasn't a fan of any team, never even occurred to me, I just loved SLB as much as any of them, I just didn't care about the results, or the matches, or the events, or the sports... 2004 changed it all! Not sure how, or why, but the motto of that event ("WE LOVE FOOTBALL") became true for me, and I was swept like the entire country in football madness, we knew all the games, all the players, all the teams, all the play-by-play...it was brilliant! For the first time in my life I looked around me and saw hope, and willingness, and fire in my countrymen. Usually most portuguese people will only self criticize, everything is bad, everything is small, we were allways alike this, we will always be like this...for a people who sailed around the world and "discovered" half of it, nowadays we are reduced to just being content...it's maddening! So during that month or so, everywhere you looked you could see people similing, strangers bonding over a newspaper, a little less selfishness, energy, passion...it was moving. And when it ended it left a bittersweet taste, but the country's awareness is now changed, unfortunately it mainly revolves around football, but still, now we all know that we have something to be proud of that it's not something that happen 500 years ago! Nowadays me and my mom have seats in the stadium for the football season, and you can now see a lot more women there and envolved in those discussions that used to be all men, so maybe, and just maybe football in this case made us all a little more equal...and although the rivalry between teams is as strong as ever, when it comes to matches of the National Team, we are all the same!