Hello, everyone! This is from opening day last season, but it took me a long time to write it. I want to post it here to show my appreciation to the St Pauli supporters.

In 2025, my wife and I were travelling in Germany from Vancouver. We travel to see beyond the stereotypes and generalities of places, and our trip through Germany demolished the stereotypes in the English-speaking world of efficient, cold, and humourless Germans. Everywhere went, people were warm, laid back, considerate, and generally wonderful.

The warmest interaction we had was on the train to from Berlin to Hamburg where we sat in different seats. My wife struck up conversation with the man next to her, who told her he was a model returning home from New York. They discussed American visa policies, family immigration stories (his from Senegal, hers from Sri Lanka), and football. He said he was in New York to watch his friend, Maxim Choupo-Moting. My wife asked if I knew who this was, I said, of course, he’s a big player! I wondered, who is this person she’s talking with, how famous is he? She also mentioned that we had tickets to the St Pauli-Dortmund match, which thrilled him, and she suggested we switch seats so he and I could talk football.

We discussed how I got tickets (I wrote to the fanladen and requested four of the visiting fan tickets), his footballing career in Hamburg SV’s youth system after immigrating to Germany, football culture in Germany versus North American sports culture, AFCON, and the city of Hamburg (which won my heart more than any other German city). I told him I teach my elementary students about African countries using AFCON, with each student studying one of the tournament teams and all of us watching games together at lunchtime. He fist-pumped in his chair and said he would have loved to be in my class when he was a kid. I told him about my first time watching Senegal as a teenager in the 2002 World Cup against France. He said he was still a kid in Senegal then, and they all ate chicken that day because the butchers gave out free chickens in celebration of Senegal beating France with their rooster-adorned jerseys. He then showed me an Instagram conversation he had with Cesc Fabregas about whether Assane Diao should play for Senegal or Spain. Again, I wondered, how famous is this guy? Does Fabregas just reply to anyone who messages him? He said he’s known in his field, so people like Cesc will reply to him.

He also said that while he supports Hamburg because he played there and still knows people there, St Pauli supporters have won his heart more than Hamburg supporters. He told me a heartbreaking story of being a youth player and watching a senior game in the Hamburg ultras section where someone threw beer on him while everyone looked away. He said at St Pauli games, he feels like he can be himself.

As we arrived in Hamburg, your most glorious Nordic-German city on the River Elbe, Lake Alster, and all their spidering canals, we got off the train and thanked him for the conversation and the introduction to Hamburg. He said, ‘no problem, welcome to my city, bro.’ He gave us his card and told us to add him on social media. I have deleted my social media for my own sanity, so I unfortunately couldn’t add him, but we looked him up, and he turned out to be Germany’s top male model and international male model of the year nominee Alpha Dia! From a Hamburg youth player to international model, Hamburg really is his city. He must be plugged into everything cool there. And yet, he was the most down-to-earth guy, just sitting there and chatting football, immigration, travel, politics, and life with us. You would never know he’s world-renowned in his field. It was the most wonderful introduction to a city.

The next day, my wife, her friend, and I were in a café having breakfast a few hours before the game. I was charged up; this was our first European football match. My wife very lovingly entertains my football fandom, watching these games with me in a sociological kind of way, using them as an opportunity to learn about cultures in different cities. We had previously watched Pumas UNAM in Mexico City, which was amazing as well. But I was in two places at once because I had received a message in the night from my brother asking me to call him when the time zones matched, saying it was important. Then I got a phone call from my aunt back home during breakfast confirming my bleakest thoughts: my mom was dead. A lifelong struggle with addiction finally caught up to her body. To be across the world from the sudden death of my mother was so strange and heart-wrenching. There was no chance to say any goodbyes, square any disputes, or tell her what I appreciated about her as a parent and as a human. The lack of closure is still agonizing.

My wife asked if I still wanted to go to the match. I told her we had to; we couldn’t just sit at home and do nothing for the final week of our trip. Continuing our travels would be a good distraction.

During my train conversation with Alpha, he noticed I was wearing a Scotland national team jersey, and I told him my mom was from Glasgow. He loved this and told me that St Pauli have a connection to Celtic. As we walked toward the Millerntor, there was a guy in a kilt playing bagpipes outside the stadium. I walked up to the man and told him my mom was from Glasgow and had just died that day. I thanked him for letting me hear bagpipes in Germany on my mother’s death day.

As we walked beside the stadium, the brick wall of the Millerntor towering over us, I saw the rainbow flag streaked across the stadium. After my parents separated when I was two-years-old, my mom started dating women. My brother and I lived half the time with each parent, switching homes every week. With my mom, we lived in a housing co-op run by lesbian women in one of Vancouver’s queer neighbourhoods, Commercial Drive. This was the community I grew up with in the 80s and 90s. My first fantasy sports experience was a hockey pool run by my mom’s girlfriend at the time, a woman named Spike. In the summer, we watched her friends play in the local lesbian softball league. My mom used to say that when I was young, I would tell people I wanted to be a lesbian when I grew up. I didn't know what that meant; I just knew I wanted to be like the lesbians in my community.

So as we walked by the rainbow flag across the stadium, it brought tears to my eyes because it matters to me that people be accepted in football and elsewhere. Growing up, I never wanted my friends to know about my mom. It wasn’t easy being the boy in the lesbian housing co-op in the 1990s (shamefully, I must admit I adopted homophobia as a defense mechanism on the schoolyard). I’ll never forget the day I was playing goalie on my football team as an 11-year-old and my mom came to the game with her girlfriend. My teammate came to me mid-game and said, ‘bro, is your mom a lesbian?’ I denied, denied, denied, and played terribly the rest of the game. It made me emotional to think that if there was any club in the world where my mother would have watched a game with me, it would have been St Pauli.

As we moved through the swarm of people outside the stadium, we had a difficult time figuring out how to get to the lineup for our section in the standing section on the north stand of the Millerntor, but then we got adopted by a group of older punks around my mom’s age, a woman and four men in their 50s and 60s. The woman took my wife and her friend under her wing as women at a football match. She showed us all around the stadium, which my wife said felt like our old university student union building in the best way possible. They told us stories about Hamburg fans starting fights with them, even though they were just old hippies. They rolled cigarettes in the stands. They taught us the songs. They hugged us during goals. They were called the Fan Club St Pauli Suderelbe. My mom would have fit right in with them.

Then the game happened, and you know how that went. When Eric Smith scored that banger to draw the game level at 3-3 in the 89^th minute, and the crowd sang their songs for the entire ten minutes of added time, I hadn’t experienced anything like that in sport. It was hard to focus on the match as waves of emotion crashed over me while my mother visited me in the Millerntor. I watched with tears in my eyes. At full time, a man beside me hugged me and said, ‘this is your first time?! It’s never like this!’

If I was going to watch a match anywhere in the world on the day my mom died, nothing could have been better than watching St Pauli in Hamburg. I’m a fan for life now.