French football may have finally won me over  

An unexpected boon of moving to France was the get-out-of-jail it presented for West Bromwich Albion football games.

Ten years on, the 900km separation of Hawthorns and home is a gift that keeps on giving.

My husband has cajoled me to just one live football event in that time – a relatively tedium-lite fixture between Japan and Spain during the 2024 Olympics, in which most in the crowd were more invested in Mexican waves and getting their hands on Olympics merch than minding too much what was happening on the pitch. It was… okay.

Season ticket

That same year, local side AJ Auxerre were promoted to Ligue 1 and the possibility of watching their games started gradually being dropped into conversation. When the club did not immediately get relegated, nor the year after, I accepted it might be worth the €400 for an adult and child season ticket – as long as that adult was not me.

I don’t know if it was guilt, or gallantry, or just plain idiocy, but I did find myself agreeing to “just one” match. Like any painful episode in life, I preferred to get it over quickly and went to an early home game in September. 

Bafflingly, it was… also okay.

For a start, the weather. The Hawthorns lays claim to being the highest ground above sea level in England’s professional leagues, and even in autumn temperatures can feel well below average. Let me tell you, 90 minutes goes a whole lot faster in Burgundy’s 30C Indian summer and without English mizzle.

Cheaper - and cheerier

Adding another crumb of novelty is the two fingers French football seems to give to traditional naming conventions. ‘FC’ suffixes are few and far between. Instead, club monikers play pick ’n’ mix with all the other letters of the alphabet for inscrutable abbreviation soups such as ESTAC Troyes and LOSC Lille. For the first 10 minutes of the game I watched, you might reasonably have believed Auxerre were pitted against some horrible new SARS variant in ‘SB29’, the name of the visiting Brest team.

Mostly, though, it was the atmosphere that felt different to the games I remember in England. Less tribal; a little more permissive. Maybe this is because Ligue 1 matches are significantly cheaper – figures suggest the Premier League is 1.4× to nearly 3× pricier depending on whether you compare total season-ticket averages or per-match costs. Either way, it means you don’t have to be a die-hard fan to justify the outlay – plenty can just come along for the kicks and giggles.

The final whistle

Sure, there are still gros mots and gripes about the ref, but  – certainly on this occasion – less vitriol behind it all. When Brest scored first and some errant away fans celebrated in the Auxerre terrace, no one hauled them off to the parcage visiteurs for their own safety. No one really batted an eyelid.

Even the baying pack of ‘ultras’ penned behind the goal were welcome for consistently choreographing something of actual interest (colossal flags! drums!) away from, well, the ever-dreary game of football itself. I might go so far as to admit the final result was an upset. Auxerre 2 - The Hill I Will Die On 1.