The sound of soft reggae playing from an iPhone can be heard coming from a corner of the team locker room. In the heart of Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen, world famous hippie neighbourhood Christiania’s football team are gearing up for an important match – and they have a most unusual warm-up regime. “I’d say that 85 per cent of the team are cannabis or hashish smokers,” says striker Philip as he walks onto the pitch, armed with a wide smile and a lit joint. His 10 teammates congregate languorously in the stands, in various states of happy highness. With a first aid kit brimming with rolling papers, and local bar Woodstock as its official sponsor, this club is a team like no other.
CSC’s coach, Peter – small, but with an insatiable appetite for hashish – arrives an hour before kick-off. The panniers of his traditional Christiania cargo bike, a hippie rebuild of the classic Long John bicycle, are packed with spare balls and brightly coloured cones (no, not those cones). Peter is confident ahead of today’s match. His team is riding on a wave of glory, having
not lost a single game the previous year.
Christiania undoubtedly has a less rigorous training regime than your average competitive team, but they nonetheless play excellent football. With slogans ranging from ‘Joint the club!’ to ‘You’ll never smoke alone’, their advertising material accurately reflects their sense of humour and team spirit.
The players have a range of experience, with a number of previous first and second division players amongst them, but what characterises them all is their laidback attitude to training – despite being a successful team, CSC by no means practice every day. Conversations about a player’s endurance are more likely to refer to how many joints each man can get through in one evening than the distance run in the most recent physical fitness test.
The team’s hometown is properly known as Fristaden Christiania, Danish for Freetown Christiania. A recently declared autonomous region of about 850 residents, the town is notorious for its soft attitude towards soft drugs. Famous for its main drag, known as Pusher Street, where hash and weed are sold and consumed openly from permanent stands, Christiania is a well-known symbol of the progressive and liberal Danish lifestyle. Many businesses and organisations use it as a showcase for foreign visitors and guests, and after the Hans Christian Andersen-inspired Little Mermaid statue, Christiania is Denmark’s most-visited tourist attraction. CSC’s colourful, cobbled-together clubhouse is situated on Pusher Street itself, in the heart of Christiania’s thriving ‘Green Light District.’
The players warm up for the day’s match with a game of foot-volley. Each time a woozy player gives the ball too hard a kick, it bounces amongst the pot-smoking paraphernalia – homemade pipes, hash trunks, and 100 Krone [around $AU17] bills. Originally a disused military barracks, in 1971 the area was taken over by an enterprising group of several hundred squatters. They aimed “to build a society from scratch,” in the words of their leading spokesperson, Jacob Ludvigsen, “where all the seekers of peace could have their grand mediation.” The neighbourhood soon became the hub of a burgeoning
hippie movement, which developed its own rules – independent of those of the Danish government.
CSC has long been an integral part of the community. Twenty-four-year resident of Christiania, Tjald, who used to play for CSC in the ‘80s and early-‘90s, knows the team’s history better than anyone. He is no longer able to play but doesn’t miss a single match, and for him the football team are a symbol of the ‘Freetown’ itself. Christiania’s residents cherish their right to live in a way that challenges society’s expectations, and, more importantly, the right to smoke wherever and whenever they want. “By supporting the team, you indirectly support the existence of Christiania itself,” explains Tjald.
This year, hardcore CSC supporters can buy an annual pass to home matches. Five thousand Danish Krone gets you your own seat – carried into the stands for you – a Danish lunch box (why wouldn’t you want one?), an umbrella (it rains a lot in Denmark), and a joint for each half.
Tjald, who is the self-proclaimed leader of the team’s official fan club, is adamant that smoking before, during, and after the match has a positive effect on the team’s performance. “Many of the guys out there are very talented football players and have played in the Danish top leagues and teams,” says Tjald, all the while cheering the players on. “Now, they don’t want to train, but they still want to play football at a high level.” No doubt. He claims that the hash and weed are a positive influence: “Previously we used to get many yellow and red cards. But when playing stoned, even the most aggressive of our players doesn’t get sent off, because he feels more relaxed.”
One of the team’s distinctive quirks is players wearing a different coloured sock on each foot. “So many of us were so stoned that we forgot our socks,” Tjald says. “We then had to share socks with other guys, and often we ended up with a different colour on each leg. With time it became a tradition.”
Clad in the red and yellow of Christiania’s spotted flag, the players look as professional as any other soccer team out there, except for the odd socks. Whereas Barcelona has UNICEF as its official sponsor, Christiania Sports Club has the commune’s most popular bar, Woodstock, backing it. Named after the famous hippie festival, the Woodstock Bar is located at the end of Pusher Street and is open right through – from regular 9am breakfasts of coffee, cereal, and toast, to less conventional 6:45am breakfasts for baked, beer-drinking backgammon players who have yet to go to bed after a big night.
It is still 0-0 in the match. The stakes are high, as the winner will be a strong contender for promotion to the fourth division at the end of the season. Many teams would arrive on minibuses together, but the Christiania players are disinclined to engage in such extensive pre-match planning. Most of the boys meet at the clubhouse a few hours before kick-off, smoke a couple of joints, and then drift across the hippie paradise, through graffiti-decorated streets, to the home pitch. The last one to arrive is Coach Peter. The side of his bicycle’s load box bears the slogan: “You’ll Never Smoke Alone”, an irreverent take on the legendary Liverpool “You’ll Never Walk Alone” football song.
Ex-Danish first division player and semi-professional player in South America, Philip, brings the ball up on the left, and with an elegant dribble spins around the opposing defender and passes the ball to a teammate, who scores in an open goal. Christiania is up 1-0. Today’s opponent is FC Sydhavnen. The team’s coach, Michael, thinks that playing against a stoned team isn’t necessarily an advantage for his side. Discussing Christiania’s performance, Michael says, “We have no idea how they will play today, because their play depends in a certain way on how stoned they are.” The FC Sydhavnen coach takes his team through a traditional warm-up with a trainer, before talking tactics around a whiteboard. “Christiania are very unpredictable, which is good in football.
The only thing I can tell my own players is
to follow our usual tactics,” he says. On the other side of the pitch, CSC coach Peter wanders up and down in a white Lacoste shirt and a purple cap, with a large joint in his hand. Peter doesn’t stop smoking for a second, even when filling in the day’s 11-man line-up list for the Football Federation – he simply holds the pen and his joint in the same hand. His assistant, equally impaired, runs the half-hearted warm-up. Holding a joint and an ancient Nokia phone as a stopwatch, he summons the players to their feet.
It is immediately evident that physical fitness is not CSC’s strong point. The official team photo is taken just before kick-off, and the players show their devil-may-care attitude by pushing each other off their knees as the camera flashes. Despite their messing around, at the end of the match CSC are victorious. The score is 3-1, and the team have taken the first important step towards the fourth division. A content Tjald wanders over and explains that his biggest dream is for the team to be in the third division, with an accompanying place on Danish betting websites. “Imagine one day being able to bet on this team,” he says, smiling.
As I leave the stands, several players are already celebrating the day’s victory with a couple of big joints. I ask Tjald if he honestly believes smoking doesn’t reduce the players’ performance on the pitch. With an enormous grin, he shakes his head. “You shouldn’t take a sportsman out of his daily element before playing,” he states. “If they had played ‘clean’ today, they wouldn’t have been the same – they would have lost. These guys are stoned all day long. Of course they have to play stoned”.
Most sporting competitions use drugs tests to detect performance-enhancing drugs in the players’ bodies. However, it is unlikely anyone has thought of testing for performance-inhibiting drugs – or, at least, those that are assumed to be performance inhibiting. With its car-free streets, eco-friendly homes, and smoky, thriving bars, Christiania is the heady nerve centre of alternative living. The town and its football team demonstrate that we could all take a leaf out of the Green Light District’s book: Smoke, relax, and just enjoy the game.
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