PARIS—The concept of the sports bar is not one that has yet captured the hearts and minds of Parisians. I proclaim this fact to you with an air of historical frustration, but also with a newfound sense of hope courtesy of the website AlloMatch.com.
I’m back in France after a couple weeks in Canada, where I shuttled back and forth between Montreal and Toronto with Via Rail (a grim proposition for someone now thoroughly acquainted with the exquisite French rail system – I wish I could remember where I’d recently read a quote about how “Canada has a rail system that Bulgaria would be embarrassed by.” Probably in the Economist).
And though my Canadian sojourn wasn’t particularly sporting – nothing exciting enough for a Canadian dateline (sorry Shane), though I did manage to reconnect on a box-scores-and-highlights level with my Vancouver Canucks amid the team’s recent hot streak, which was nice – I did take comfort in the fact that, had I wanted to see a particular big game, I’d have had any number of opportunities to seek out said television broadcast, either on basic cable or at a sports bar with a satellite feed, a place like McSorley’s in Toronto’s Leaside or, barring any better option, a Shoeless Joe’s.
I’m a fan of the sports bar. It’s not just a bar with a television that I’m talking about here. I mean, rather, an establishment where the entire raison d’etre of the place is to show live sporting matches – and the more obscure the game, the better.
Example: a place in Toronto where you can watch the Leafs on a Saturday night? That’s a bar. A place in Toronto where you can sit at the bar and watch the second game of a Cleveland-Kansas City doubleheader in April, simply by buying a pint and asking the barkeep to put it on? That’s a sports bar.
These sorts of places exist in Toronto and Montreal, though not as prominently as they feature in two other sports-crazed cities where I’ve lived as an adult: Chicago and Boston. Now those are cities where the sports bar is king! A place where you can sit down on a stool and argue with the stranger seated beside you, for the better part of an hour, about whether Jim Rice belongs in the Hall of Fame, or whether Duke has the front-line scoring to go deep in the tournament, or whether Manny Ramirez is really worth $45 million for two years? That’s my sort of place.
(The correct answers to these questions, for those playing at home: Who cares; Hopefully not; and Of course he is! The guy just hits baseballs!)
In Paris, the situation isn’t as dire as I make it out to be. There are bars to catch the game you’re looking for – mostly British and Irish pubs for continental football fans, or Aussie bars for southern-hemisphere rugby, or a handful of Canadian bars for anyone looking for a particular hockey or baseball game. (Yes, the “Canadian bar” is a thing here. More so than American sports bars. Don’t ask me why.)
The problem is that all of these places are Anglo-centric. So, to use the example that I faced last night, if you want to find somewhere to watch Champions League football (which, along with the French domestic Ligue 1, is not shown on basic cable unless a French side is involved, and even then it’s dicey), and there are four simultaneous matches going on, and two of them feature English Premier League teams, and the match you want to watch is Bayern Munich versus Sporting Portugal (because your friend from Munich is in town) … well, at any of the usual suspects, you can pretty much assume that they’ll be showing one or both of the English games, and German fans be damned.
Trying to plan the evening to assure that we’d catch the game, I checked in on the three Portuguese bars in our neighbourhood in the 17th arrondissement. The best bet, a place on my street that’s always showing some sort of Portuguese sporting event on their big screen, day or night, informed me with regret that their TV had broken the day before.
The other two bars? They “couldn’t guarantee” that they’d show the match, Sporting’s first foray into the Champions League knockout stage in the club’s history. Really? Maybe there was an exciting rerun of France’s favourite CSI edition, “CSI New York,” that would be more compelling to the bar’s clientele? (Yes, the French love “CSI New York.” Again, don’t ask me why. Solving these sorts of cultural mysteries is above my pay grade.)
It was looking slightly grim for my visiting Bayern fan (apparently there’s no such thing as “German bars” abroad, as German expats prefer to blend in to the local culture rather than huddling together with other Germans), until I stumbled across a website called AlloMatch.com.
I am fully convinced that this is the greatest website in the world.
Here’s how the two-year-old website works: Parisian bars that routinely show live sporting matches register on the website. The patrons of these bars create and maintain their bar’s match schedule – announcing which matches they’ll be showing, which matches will be accompanied by audio (obviously if you’re showing four matches in one room, not all of them will have audible play-by-play switched on), and even whether supporters from one side or the other traditionally frequent their establishment – registered users of the site can also note whether they’ll be attending a particular screening.
So when I entered “Bayern vs. Sporting,” I immediately had a list of 11 bars in Paris that had pledged to show the match, with addresses, phone numbers, maps, full broadcasting schedules. The works.
So my next question was, How do I know that these bars will actually be showing the matches they say they’ll be showing? Because it’s definitely happened before that I’ve called ahead to a bar and showed up to see the game that the bartender promised me would be on, only to be told that, unfortunately, a group of six Kansas Jayhawks supporters had just shown up to watch a simultaneous broadcast of their basketball team whupping up on a #16 seed in the tournament and, sorry, they couldn’t possibly switch it back to my game now. True story.
AlloMatch, which as far as I can tell by the site’s staff photos is run by a bunch of twenty-something booze hounds (kudos to them), also tells you how reliable a particular bar is at showing what they say they will show, based on user-submitted notices when a bar fails to live up to its promises. And wasn’t I pleased to see that the bar profiled in the previous paragraph had the lowest possible reliability ranking on the site!
So thanks to AlloMatch, we ended up at a great bar with an impeccable reliability ranking called ZCaffé, in the 9th, run by some exceedingly friendly Algerians, where we got to watch, along with a Bayern-faithful crowd, Franck Ribéry and company trash Sporting to the tune of 5-0. And with play-by-play audio, to boot! Bernd, the Mlle and I were in the downstairs bar, and ZCaffé also had two upstairs nooks for the Chelsea–Juventus (1-0 to the Blues, to the distress of the huge crowd of Juve fans in attendance) and Real Madrid–Liverpool games. (1-0 to the Reds, and damn if the stupid EPL teams aren’t poised to dominate the knockout stages again this year. Ugh.) I logged a fair number of miles on the bar’s staircase, sprinting up from the basement with every roar to keep appraised of the other scores, especially when the Bayern victory got out of hand.
All in all, it was a fantastic night of football at a fantastic sports bar in Paris. Who knew such a thing existed? AlloMatch did, apparently. Still, I wouldn’t think it wise for a start-up in Boston to attempt the same thing – in a city like that, such a website would be crashing internet servers across the state of Massachusetts. Constantly.
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