Last night (Nov. 17) Britain and France held a football match at London’s Wembley Stadium, the first major sporting event since the attacks in Paris. In a tribute to the French team and its visiting fans, the stadium filled with French flags before the game and more than 70,000 spectators sang “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem.
BBC reports that the Football Association (FA) encouraged fans of England to learn the words to the song in order to show solidarity.
England won the match with a score of 2-0, but much of the media coverage of the game has focused on its role in healing grief in the attack’s aftermath.
“We can be rightly proud we were able to put this event on. As we’ve said, the French FA [Football Association] were the ones who decided the game should go ahead,” England manager Roy Hodgson told The Guardian.
Football fans in Germany last night weren’t so fortunate. A scheduled match against that country and the Netherlands was cancelled abruptly due to a “concrete security threat.”
Follow our coverage of the Paris attacks here.