You stumble off the Party Train in a foreign wasteland. As always, 
Top Ten Reasons to Support FC Luzern
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JustCantBeatThat.com were invited to write a column in the Stelzbock, an excellent FC Luzern fanzine issued quarterly and distributed for free at the ground.
The article below is our contribution, we are now republishing it with the kind permission of the Stelzbock. You can download a full pdf version of the magazine here.
10. Polyglot Ultras.
Us knowingly no other league in the world provides the same opportunity to perfect your linguistics skills while insulting the opposing fans, or buying a ‘sausisse’ in Sion or a ‘birra’ in Belinzona.
9. Party Train.
Now how good is this, all you have to do is to buy a 20 CHF return ticket, a bottle of Passoa, some vodka and a few Eichhofs. The party train will then make sure you get to the stadium and back. And the best part of it is that 100% of your co-passengers are brothers and sisters from the FCL family. Not a single herbal tea drinking, NZZ reading bore telling you to be quiet and climb down from the overhead luggage rack.
8. Claudio and Prager.
It is easy to get a favorite player in the team. Often this is based on someone who was particularly good in the first game you attended. The various JCBT members have different preferences; one worships Claudio for his elegant runs forward, while another secretly writes poems for Prager. And when Claudio or Prager or whoever has a good game we feel like a proud parent somehow knowing that it happened because of our moral support and poetry.
7. Hope.
With FCL there is always hope. Hope that Rolf will turn it around at half time. That Ianu, Yakin or Paiva will score. Hope that the when the opposition scores one, we’ll score two (or three). That we will stay up. That we will reach Europe. That we will beat Sion. And in the worst case there is always hope for next season, or hope that someone will buy another round of Eichhofs.
6. Reality.
FCL is a local team, still based in reality. You may well meet a midfielder in Migros or a defender at Denner. Players do not earn 120k per week. They are not arrogant idiots who think the entire world is there to adore and serve them.
5. Gersag – Zone 2.
Old school, we can stand up, we get rained on, we can easily buy a beer from an under-aged seller. There is no waiting for the toilets, the sausages are half-decent, and if you arrive two minutes before the game there is not even a queue to get in. This is watching football as God intended it to be. No all seaters, no corporate boxes, no stewards telling us to sit down and be quiet, no prawn sandwiches and no-one never, ever, wears a tie.
4. Frequent Just Can’t Beat That Moments.
You know the feeling – that special occasion that make you think it is all worth it. You have endured two months of rain, humiliation by Sion Merde Allez and the St Gallen police. Then it happens, we beat Basel 5-1 in the snow, 4-1 away. Claudio scores. Zibung defies gravity and saves an incredible shot from Alex Arschloch, or 10,000 people reach nirvana at the exact same time when we beat Lugano in the last ever game at Allmend. Most clubs will get one of these a year – at best, we on the other hand are blessed.
3. Humour.
You cannot take everything seriously, this is a valid lesson that most FCL fans have learned, and they are putting it to practice. The Human Vuvuzela is legendary and we, FCL, invented it. Hard hats in the Leitzigrund building site, brilliant. All the shenanigans in the Utrecht away block is the stuff of legends. Other teams and their supporters will only count their worth in number of titles won, money in the bank or how many over rated and over paid players they have. We know that the true value is in having fun. Win or lose we try to laugh.
2. Amateurs.
It is somehow the club that business forgot. The website looks as if a media studies intern made it in 1998. We go to a residential building to buy our season ticket from a makeshift office in a converted apartment. Until recently the club shop had only six items and it is not even present in the ground on match days. As far as we know you still cannot buy FCL insurance, golf balls or make-up. This is how we like it. It is the club that has so far resisted commercialism and the worst excesses of modern football. May this continue well into the new ‘swissporarena’
1. You, the fans.
You support the team home and away, regardless of result. You have made us a bunch of expat football lovers feel part of your family. We have been welcomed on the FCL forum, in the party train and at the ground and now we are even allowed to write in your excellent fanzine. You Just Can’t Beat That!
