In the zone with Europe’s football fans

OFFICIALDOM always likes to speak warmly of the “family of football”, though the equally popular designation of “stakeholders” tends to bespeak an altogether more revealingly bureaucratic view of the game’s footsoldiers on the part of the universal blazer.

Either way, in the expensive, corporate world of modern football, it’s the fans who more often feel like the black sheep of the family or who are left holding, never mind a stake, barely a sausage.

At least, in this part of the world, the sausages are all the better for being the wurst (Red card — Editor), and there were plenty of them being washed down with copious draughts of beer in the official Fan Zone in Zurich on Monday night, as a crowd of 14,000 gathered to watch Germany play Austria live on the giant screen from Vienna.