Sometimes, a protest can seem like a logical thing, a stand taken against an obvious injustice. Nike know all about this, with their recent hiring of Colin Kaepernick to front their advertising campaign but there are other times that you see a protest and it seems a little less sensible. One such incident in Switzerland was just this, with more holes in the logic than a lump of emmental.
Young Boys Bern are a team you may or may not have heard of, over in the aforementioned European nation, that used to be a bit more successful than they are today. Recently, the club has also apparently invested in esports, although we are struggling to work out exactly where and have contacted them in an attempt to find out.
Picture the scene, a game between Young Boys of Bern and Basel, a team best known for the players and managers they have lost, in the Swiss top division. Fifteen or so minutes into the game, objects begin to rain down on the pitch, some yellow, some black. In what must be the strangest glitch in the simulation since Dosia gained 190IQ to throw that grenade, the pitch is being pelted with tennis balls and Sony controllers.
Stellar Sun reporting
According to the ever-stellar reporting the Sun is famous for, this was a protest against the recent investment the club has made into esports, and was supported by the Basel fans too. Whether or not they supported much else that evening is interesting, as their team played like Brazil, and not in a good way, losing 7-1 to the black and yellow of Bern, which is utterly irrelevant to the story, but still funny.
Anyway, apparently the "ultras" (which is a footballing code word for people with nothing else going on, who don’t have the money to support their team, but do it anyway and then act like they are better than you) were unhappy with YBB spending on esports, and this was their protest. When you consider what ultras in Turkey and Italy get up to, the Swiss should be happy all they have to deal with is gaming peripherals raining down on them, but it was still probably a bit inconvenient.
Expensive, too, with PS4 controllers costing between $45 and $65, depending on where you buy it, and provided you don’t want a really good one. Of course, they might have been chucking down PS3 controllers, which look very similar but cost much less, in an attempt to also make a point about cost-effective decision-making, but anyone who is willing to lob a controller at a footballer probably struggles to think in words of two or more syllables.
So, to summarise, a group of football fans went out and bought a load of peripharals used for gaming, then bought tickets to a game, to protest against the club selling the tickets investing money in gaming. Which, when you think about it, is almost as clever as buying Nike socks so you can burn them but way more expensive. Well done.
