Culture shock- as roma

This winter quarter I am spending my time across the world studying abroad in a new culture, with a new language, food, people and my personal favorite sports culture.

I chose, partially with the assistance of my dad for finding the ticket website, to drag two of my roommates with me to an AS Roma women’s game on a rainy Saturday in January and it was so fun. 

I would say I’ve grown up in a city that embraces soccer and a place where women’s soccer in particular has grown to flourish, however soccer abroad? Whole new world for me.  January 19th- Juventus playing AS Roma in a regular season game surprised me in all the good ways. The stadium- smaller than where I’m used to seeing my club play, was loud and full of people yelling and engaged in the game in a way that I haven’t seen outside of my passionate viewing of soccer at home or while watching Ted Lasso. During a game where I had no stakes I quickly grew invested and was on the edge of my seat the whole game. 

The actual game was exciting with the first goal happening 3 minutes into play (Dragoni)  and Roma breaking the ice quickly. The rest of the first half was relatively slow with my growing commentary to my roommates that these two teams were not fans of each other. Juventus opened up the scoring early in the 2nd half leading to anxiety of witnessing a loss looming. Never fear- Roma’s captain Giugliano broke the tie with a goal in the 71’ and while the victory seemed likely, a penalty in the 83’ by Linari tied the rainy game nicely with a red bow.

Going to a game in a foreign country with chants and cheers that were both unknown to me and in a different language was something that I enjoyed highly and definitely would find myself wanting to go to different games across Europe.