Imagine this.
You’re a sophomore in high school in Northern California. You’re sitting across from your mother in your favorite Chinese restaurant and over a bowl of hot and sour soup, she tells you that you’re about to be uprooted to a city in a country that you had never even considered living in.
Flash forward several months. It’s a Saturday afternoon and you’re waiting on an U-Bahn platform with your parents. Now you’ve loved football just about all your life (although you’d always called it soccer). You spent the past summer cheering on Die Deutsche Fußballnationalmannschaft because there is nothing quite like the World Cup and it was so easy to get swept up in the fervor of a sport you loved and a national team that you had grown very fond of. You had watched a fair amount of club football but you’d never really felt all that strongly about any particular club.
The train arrives at the platform. You barely find space to stand because it’s chock full of excited fans dressed all in red. And all of a sudden you think “maybe.” You think “could this be?”
Yes, yes it could. FC Bayern München was the club you had been waiting for.
Five years later, I’m an international affairs student in Washington, DC but I still call Munich home. I swear in German, dream in Italian, and I’ll bleed red and white until the day I die.
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