After years of decline, the Geneva club is back among the greats in Switzerland.
The expression “seeing life in pink”, to see life in pink, refers to that feeling of incurable optimism, carefreeness, lack of worries, with your head in the clouds and your eyes constantly heart-shaped, which only those who are in the midst of falling in love can experience. The words of Edith Piaf they were inspired by a request from her friend Marianne Michel. Accompanied by her sweet and loving voice and the sweet notes of Louis Guglielmi, they have now entered the collective Western imagination to the point of becoming a typical idiomatic expression of the French language.
La vie en rose was sung for the first time in Paris in 1946 and from that moment the link with the city of love, it has become eternal and automatic. You think of Paris and hear that melody resounding which immediately transports you there with your imagination, to walk on it Left Bank of the Seine, with your girl arm in arm, stuck together like the colorful tables of the café that you leave behind while your eyes focus, hypnotized, on the Eiffel Tower.
Aside from the unparalleled elegance of their names pronounced in French, Paris and Geneva (Paris and Genève) have almost nothing in common. One stands on the banks of a river, the other on the tip of a lake (at the end of the lake, they say in those parts). One is embellished by the constant presence of an enormous and tapered iron construction, the Eiffel Tower; the more iconic and taller tower of the other is instead a jet of water, the water jet. One is the city of love for everyone; the other the setting of Frankenstein, the anti-love story par excellence.
Yet there is something that Ginevra manages to copy quite well from Paris, in its own way, and that is it mix between prestige and urban energy, between elegance and creativity, between snobbery e underground, which make the French capital so iconic. The big difference is that in Geneva this symbiosis occurs in a completely harmonious, peaceful, almost studied way, while in Paris it is more of an eternal struggle between two worlds, which someone occasionally tries to unite, but which by nature are made to never meet.
In Paris and Geneva, elite e suburb they are united by the two cultures that most inflame current urban society: football and hip-hop, including the relevant intersections. Two cultural universes from whose imagination they draw Paris Saint Germain on the one hand, and the Servette FC on the other.The Geneva club celebrated these two urban subcultures that enrich the city in the video of presentation of this season’s shirt, in which two important exponents of the Geneva hip-hop scene appear: the rapper Aamo and Zalvf, artist of the OZadya collective whose members wore the shirt on their latest tour in Colombia. The payoff of the campaign, Genevans that weis an elegant play on words: it is pronounced in the same way as the sentence I only see us, “I don’t see anyone but us.”
The rebirth of a historic club
Servette FC takes its name fromhomonymous district of Geneva, la Servette, which in turn derives from the Latin “small forest”. It’s unclear how they came to choose the grenade as the color of the coat of arms and shirts. However, it seems that Servette had a decisive influence on one of the most historic teams in our football, the Torino. According to legend, the first president of Tourthe Swiss Alfred Dick, chose the grenade in honor of his favorite team, Servette.
If we allow ourselves to call the feeling felt by a fan for their favorite team “love”, and to consider this feeling completely similar to what we can feel for another person – and we allow ourselves to do so – we can then say that , for almost their entire history, Genevans have in some way experimented with the football version of the expression to see life in pink: in about a century of history, Servette has won 17 championships and is still there third most successful team in Switzerland, after Grasshoppers and Basel. Something, however, changed after the last title, won in 1999.
The club fell into a seemingly dead-end tunnel, in which it went through two bankruptcies, in 2004 and 2015, and three restarts from the lower divisions. The historic Stade des Charmilles, where i garnets celebrated all their successes, it was demolished and replaced by the more modern Stade de Genève. Even if the love of a fan is in good times and in bad, it is certainly not in the squad that the fans have seen the last 23 years of Servette. Many of them probably don’t even know what it means.
Every tunnel, however, has an end. Starting from the 2015/16 season, Servette undertook a slow and tortuous rebirth which led it, in May 2023, to finish the championship in second place, behind the Young Boys of Bern, thus obtaining its best result since 1999. defender Yoan Severinwith a past in Juve’s youth team, experienced the rebirth in all its phases and spoke about it on Swiss national television: “When I arrived here (2018, ed.), I immediately understood that there was ambition to find the elite again, but the club was still rebuilding. Experiencing this evolution from the inside, having started so far away, is a privilege. We see that the stadium fills up more every week, that more people wear our shirt. There is a passion that is being unleashed and we must ensure that it continues to amplify.”
Edith Piaf and the garnet color
Servette obtained the mathematical certainty of its return to Europe on a special occasion, the Rhône derby against Sion, won 5-0 and defined by the club itself as an “anthology derby”. In the following days, Servette published the film of the match on Instagram (the post below): after a few words from the leader of a Gaël Clichy shirtless, an unreleased song by the Geneva rapper Geule Blanche, entitled Garnet color.
It is a hymn to the rediscovered relationship between Servette and the people of Geneva and contains many interesting rhymes, such as:
Opening of the score all arms are raised, the capital, the real one is located at the end of Lake G’nève (The score is unlocked, all arms are raised, the capital, the real one, is located at the end of Lake Geneva) / She has too much charm, it’s my city, proud representative from the Charmilles stadium, what pride years later to bring my daughter back there (It has too much charm, it’s my city, a proud representative since the days of the Stade de Charmilles, what a pride to bring my daughter there after years) / To see that in his eyes, a bunch of stars shine (And see that in turn a bunch of stars shine in his eyes) / It’s not songs, it’s cries from the heart (They are not choirs, they are screams of the heart).
The most successful and representative part, however, is the chorus, with an unusual quote from Edith Piaf’s masterpiece:
It’s for the Servettians and all their soldiers (It’s for the “servettiens” and all their soldiers) / Those who don’t see life in pink but see it in garnet color (Those who do not see the “life in Pink” but they see it as garnet colored) / We’re going to take everything, we’ll give them the crumbs, tell me what the rest of Europe will do against the Helvetii (We will blow everything away, we will give away the scraps to others, tell me what the rest of Europe can do against the Swiss) / Geneva my capital, even on the other side of the world I would have my Servette jersey (Geneva my capital, even on the other side of the world I will wear the Servette shirt).
Servette then ended the season in second place, which in Switzerland means playing in the Champions League preliminaries. In summer, i garnets they eliminated Genk, but stopped one round before the playoff, against Rangers, thus relegated to the Europa League, where they will have to deal with Roma, Slavia Praga and Sheriff Tiraspol. However, this is a historic result that the club celebrated by launching the new season ticket campaign with a letter to the fans written by the president himself.
The third shirt for this season was also released in September. AND rosa and embodies “the essence of the Geneva summer” – we read in the launch press release – a summer spent by the lake, at the Bains des Pâquis, which an Italian tourist defined as follows Trip Advisor: “you find Geneva and its internationality, but you also find a Riviera atmosphere, tasty and cheap bouvette, swans with cygnets slalom among the daredevil swimmers (the water is chilly for us Italians).”
Pink, however, also necessarily recalls the refrain of Garnet colorwhich becomes even more explicit by reading the caption of the launch post on Instagram. The life of Servettians will never stop being garnet coloured, but since May 13th which marked its return to Europe, in Geneva they have returned to see the Life in Pink.
2023-10-05 08:00:00
#Servette #vie #rose
