I went to "The Strongest" futbol game yesterday. I suppose for a bit of comparative reflection. I'm not sure I really got much though. The reserved tickets were a mere 40 Bs. There was a 4 year old girl behind me that would occasionally be struck with the urge to yell "tigres! tigres!" which was rather cute and amusing (The Strongest's uniforms are yellow and black striped, and I assume this is why they are known as the tigres). There were fireworks and yellow smoke everytime they scored (4 times). And plenty of singing "Ole, ole ole ole, tigres. tigres."
I suppose the most profound thing I can say is that I didn't see a single pollera inside the stadium. It seemed to be more of a Zona Central thing rather than attracting people from El Alto or Villa Victoria or the like. Of course there were far, far more people there than at a wrestling event, so I imagine there were some people from all over the city. But it seemed to be more of a middle class event than the wrestling. Of course this is based entirely on my assessment of people's clothing and thus, should be taken as simply an initial assessment. I was told on the way there that my friend (from the US) had heard the local team (los tigres) was a "working class team" and the other team was more a middle class team [according to wikipedia this is both the opposite and a "gross over-generalization"]. I didn't see any fans rooting for the opposing team, so it was hard to say if that was accurate. But almost everyone in the stadium was wearing team paraphernalia.
I also hoped to see how the crowd would react when the other team scored, but the 4-0 score didn't allow such observations. Alas, I'll have to go back for another game sometime.
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