No need to light a flare for me: The first fatality in the stands is just around the corner | Column

"Hello, I am the fan who died at a football match. How are you? I left my house before the game, in the morning I was with the kids at the park, maybe I came with a friend to the game, maybe I caught a ride with a neighbor. I have a season ticket, maybe I got a ticket from a friend, I don't remember, I think the last meal I ate in my life was a slightly dry hot dog. I was wearing a red shirt with yellow stripes and a green coat, and luckily I wore my lucky underwear. It happened yesterday or tomorrow or in a year, I don't exactly remember, death sometimes blurs time but not the place. Don't make that surprised face. After all, you knew this would happen. You all knew. The writing wasn't on the wall. It was in the songs you screamed during the warm-up, in those that wished for diseases and accidents. You just didn't believe that death would actually accept the invitation and show up. It showed up, and it wears your colors. For years you nurtured this monster. You called it 'passion', you called it 'madness'. Or by the scariest name, 'nationalism'. When you lit the fire and the smoke choked the children's lungs, you said it was 'color'. And here, the blood has cooled on the concrete. Suddenly it doesn't look like a beautiful ultra decoration anymore, right? You called the stadium 'hell'. In the end, hell simply opened its gates wide. Me? I was just the first in line. So please, no need to light a flare for me. A funeral of likes. Don't come to my funeral, there's no need. I can already see it: a convoy of cars with flags, scarves on the grave, and some speech about 'the soldier who fell in the service of the club'. What service? What war? I died because of a plastic chair and hate songs. Don't put a scarf on my coffin. That's what choked me in the first place. And then the artificial minute of silence where half the stadium will boo, and hey, they'll even name the training complex of the team I supported after me. Mom, are you listening? You got a VIP season ticket to the best seat in the stadium! That's how it is when you prefer to sanctify the dead rather than fix the living. After all, at my funeral, you won't cry for me, you'll cry because the next game will be behind closed doors, without a crowd. You'll make a 'story' with a memorial candle to get likes from the opposing crowd who will say 'respect', while in their hearts they are celebrating on my blood. No one has ever won in the name of war. In war games, there is a well-known rule: the only one who profits from it is the arms dealer. The problem is that for hours I didn't understand who he was in my story. Because everyone here is profiting at my expense. The association profits from fines, the teams profit from selling season tickets to addicts — sorry, to the crowd. Politicians gain power, fan organizations profit from selling means of love. So why am I the only one paying in cash? The light finger on the trigger and the baton. It is impossible to talk about the blood on the concrete without talking about the blue above it. The writing was there every time we saw police entering the stands like a hit squad, with eyes burning with hatred towards anyone wearing a scarf. Police violence has become an integral part of the user experience at the stadium. Pointless pushing, horses trampling a crowded audience, and batons landing on heads without distinguishing between a hooligan and a boy at a Bar Mitzvah. When the State of Israel treats football fans as potential terrorists and not as citizens, don't be surprised when this encounter ends in body bags. This violence does not come to prevent the disaster, it is often its accelerator, the spark that lights the powder keg we are all sitting on. When the metaphor becomes a corpse. Anyone who smells death at a football stadium knows it doesn't smell like it does in hospitals. There is no sterility in it. It smells like a compressed mixture of wet grass, cheap cigarettes, and the sweat of thousands of people who in one moment turned from fellow travelers into accomplices to a crime. The myth and its breaking. For decades they sold us that football is a "matter of life and death". We adopted the terminology of war: "front", "battle", but on the day I fell lifeless in the stands, it turned out that football is much less than that, and life is much more. This stadium, which we called "home", turned into a graveyard. The game of life. And death. Don't say "a handful". This word is the refuge of cowards. It wasn't a handful, it was the atmosphere. It was the electricity in the air that said everything is permitted in the name of love for the color, and it was the systemic contempt from the police and club managements that said a fan's life is expendable. In the end, love and neglect united into one hangman's noose. The game might continue next Saturday. The players will go up, the crowd will sing. But in one seat in the stands, an emptiness will remain that will laugh in all our faces. Because after all, we knew this would happen. We were just too busy singing to stop it in time. Just please, no need to light a flare for me in memory."