The Schlachthofviertel (district) and the area around the Isar river are the places where you will find the most bars that have table football in the back room. We spent an evening playing our way through the relevant spots in the city – and learn some humble respect at the same time.
Let me first say that by the end of all this I will have “scored” a single brilliant rebound goal – in five or six games. Or was it more than that? But wait a moment: right at the start of the first game against these two guys in their late forties – Robin and George – things were actually looking very good: I narrowly missed the goal several times after a series of nimbly cascading passes from my front line, and Robin was visibly struggling to get past my lines when he had possession of the ball.
Well there you go. Shortly beforehand, here in Südstadt on Thalkirchner Strasse, I’d been peering across from the other table, looking for more worthy opponents than the two friendly but overambitious students I was playing: I’d just comfortably shown them their limitations for the third time. What is it with these novices?
Now Robin here – he’s clearly of quite a different calibre. After another minute or two, I start to have my doubts – from a distance, he somehow looked more dynamic, more skilful. And is he really standing at the table with his legs crossed? Seems a bit too laid back to me ...
Question: “You’re not really playing seriously yet, are you?” Affable smile, slightly patronising chuckle from his mate George, devastatingly clear answer: “No.” – “OK, well let’s go for it now, shall we?” I hear myself say fearlessly. And from then on the instruction session took its course – though that makes it sound as if I had a say in the matter. I didn’t.
I was fairly and squarely put in my place. And my goal only looked as if it was brilliant. We’d swapped partners – Robin was now in my defence – and I said I finally wanted to learn how to pass from one row to the next.
I was to park my strikers on the left-hand rail and tilt them slightly forward; as if by magic, the ball suddenly landed there with pinpoint accuracy, and I then hit it towards the goal – in a move that was way too hectic of course, yet accidentally precise – after which it popped in past George’s goalkeeper. I wasn’t so bad after all!
Ahem ... and thank you, George: I’ve rarely seen anyone let a goal in while at the same time conveying so credibly that they didn't mean to.
They’re both slightly run-down yet kind of inviting student bars serving bottled beer and playing punk music, where the walls start to sweat as the night progresses.
According to Robin there are about thirty to forty players in Munich who really take the game seriously. Surprisingly, most of the foosball bars have become established around the Schlachthofviertel. Two of Munich’s veritable temples to the sport are located in Isarvorstadt between the Isar river and Theresienwiese (Oktoberfest fairground) – Südstadt, and Flex in Ringseisstrasse.
They’re both slightly run-down yet kind of inviting student bars serving bottled beer and playing punk music, where the walls start to sweat as the night progresses. At both you’re very likely to come across players who make playing foosball seem not like pinball but like some kind of surreal, high-precision and high-speed art of stop-and-go.
It’s astonishing just to observe the finely tuned skill with which they move the bar grip between wrist and palm. Incidentally, it’s actually no wonder so many of these pubs are located in the Schlachthofviertel: there’s barely another neighbourhood in the city that is able to offer quite the same rough-hewn charm, with its colourful, clubby atmosphere and so many of this particular type of rather dingy pub – referred to in Bavarian dialect as Boazn.
To give you some idea of what it means to really be able to good at football: when an expert comes up against a non-expert (by no means a beginner) and the expert really starts to play, within a few seconds the non-expert won’t even know what’s happening. In other words: the unskilled player won’t just fail to score a goal themselves, they won’t even notice the goals they let in.
At least it would have saved me from having to endure the worst-case scenario: anyone losing 6:0 traditionally has to crawl under the table as a forfeit.
When played properly, everything in this game just happens way too fast – so fast that to the untrained eye, even slow motion is not really any help. To find out for yourself, watch a game on YouTube by Thomas Haas: he’s the leading German player and the current world number one by a significant margin.
It’s also true that what the vast majority of bar players do has little to do with football in the truly advanced sense: it’s more like bobbing a little white ball back and forth – more luck than skill.
In a duel with the expert, your typical overconfident pub stalwart is likely to fail at the very first official rule: for the kick-off, the ball is not actually rolled through the hole. It is placed in front of the central figure of the middle row of five belonging to the team that has kick-off. And from there, before full-on battle commences, the ball has to be played back and forth at least twice between two of a team’s figures.
In the case of the non-expert, the ball instantly rolls away from the figure’s feet to one of the opponent’s figures, of course. Groan.
How can you easily identify players who really know what they’re doing – possibly even before you get shown up? One option is to look out for the ones who have water in their half-litre glasses rather than lager. But one definite indicator is if they have a bottle of Pronto polishing spray at hand to make sure the poles glide smoothly back and forth.
And talking of gliding smoothly back and forth: a rebound goal is when a player moves their forward line so skilfully that one of the figures gets hit by a ball played by their opponent, who is trying to clear it away; it then rebounds back into the goal without the attacker even having to strike it intentionally. Clack-clack. My rebound goal happened when George was all too hurriedly and brutally trying to smash the ball past my forward line, which – in my desperation – I was using to try and block him. Ha – there I was again! But George only made the mistake once, of course.
At least it would have saved me from having to endure the worst-case scenario: anyone losing 6:0 traditionally has to crawl under the table as a forfeit.
This is rarely actually done and if so, it tends to be regarded more as a point of honour than a forfeit, Robin tells me – noting with amused appreciation that there is one particular player with something of a reputation in the city who always insists on crawling under the table after a 6:0 loss. But after a few more humiliating games it seems to me that it is somehow appropriate – both as a mark of respect for the game and as a punishment for my initial conceit.
If there happens to be anyone out there who wants to try it, please be warned: there’s a lot less space under a foosball table than you might think, the floor tends to be very sticky – especially late at night – and there are really sharp bits protruding from underneath.
