The beautiful chaos of the old FIFA Fan Fest is gone. What’s left is fabricated fun

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It is rare to be envious of the people who couldn’t get a ticket. When you not only couldn’t be there, at the actual event, but also couldn’t be there, at the alternative. The 2006 FIFA World Cup Fan Fest was one of these occasions. When missing out on attending a match at the showpiece tournament in Germany came with the silver lining of seeing it on a big screen at the best party ever.

That sounds like an overstatement, but those 12 official live sites in host cities around the country really were where any fan in front of a television anywhere in the world would rather have been. The epicentre was Berlin, right near the Brandenburg Gate, where a total of about nine million revellers gathered at the Fan Mile across the 31 days of the tournament.

Think live build-up gigs from Right Said Fred (I’m Too Sexy was big in Germany) and Simple Minds, followed by a heaving tournament-time shindig blending football and more music, and a stereotype-challenging showcase of the world’s population as it really was. Where flags and opposing shirts, and hijabs and miniskirts, all happily co-existed inside an enclosure the size of 14 football fields.

Sure, this was a World Cup, which meant it was heavy on corporate sponsorship and FIFA excesses. But there remained a purity about that inaugural Fan Fest, at a World Cup whose slogan was “A time to make friends”. And even with lots of beer involved, fans were treated like adults and behaved like them. Football really did unite, and those first official branded events – major public screening areas and parties had been implemented by host cities since France 1998 –........

© The Sydney Morning Herald