A Merry Mad Month

A REUNITED GERMANY HOSTS THE WORLD CUP AGAIN AFTER 22 YEARS. MILLIONS OF FANS UNITED BEHIND THE UNIVERSAL GAME WILL DIVIDE IN 12 CITIES, RIDING THE HOPES OF 32 TEAMS.

May 28, 2006|John Powers, Globe Staff

he last train from Kaiserslautern to Hamburg leaves at 1:58 in the morning. Miss it, and you and your companions could end up mimicking The Who on their ``The Kids Are Alright" album cover, sleeping huddled together against a wall with the Union Jack for a blanket. Such is the picaresque life during soccer's monthlong World Cup, the quadrennial championship of the planet's most popular sport, which will be held this time in Germany.

From June 9 until July 9, more than 5 million peripatetic pilgrims (25,000 of them Americans) will chase the game from Munich to Berlin watching the Brazilians, Italians, Togolese, Australians, Japanese, and Costa Ricans kick each other in the shins. Thirty-two countries, 12 cities, 64 matches. If this is Wednesday, this must be Gelsenkirchen and the Portuguese and the Mexicans.

Unlike the last Cup, which was co-staged by Japan and South Korea and was a crazy-making logistical nightmare for fans, this one will be decidedly more manageable. The Germans, who last played host in 1974, when both the country and its capital still were divided between West and East (and the West -- the Federal Republic of Germany -- beat the Netherlands, 2-1, in the final), have gone out of their way to make sure there's room for everyone who wants to drop by, whether they have tickets or not.

A number of helpful websites (www.fifaworldcup.com and www.fanguide2006.org are the most useful) provide armfuls of information about rooms, tickets, transportation, and entertainment for fans of what most of the world calls football, whether they plan to stay for a month or a day. There's even an unprecedented 24-hour fan hot line based in Frankfurt that will help with virtually any problem imaginable .

``A Time to Make Friends" is the event's official slogan, but authorities understand that the Cup inspires passions that can be far from amicable. Though hooliganism, long the sport's scourge on the Continent, has been on the wane except in Poland, where police arrested more than 200 rampaging fans this month, specters of terrorism and racism remain. With Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia in the field, there's the possibility of Muslim unrest. And last month's savage beating of an Ethiopian man in Potsdam and an Arab man in Berlin raised worries of thuggish attacks on non white visitors by neo-Nazis in the eastern part of the country.