Dutch Fans Watch Footie in Underpants

The following is from today's Guardian:

For Dutch football fans it has become the summer's cult outfit. Over the past few months, a quarter of a million Holland supporters have bought themselves a pair of patriotic orange lederhosen - wearing them whenever Holland take to the pitch in the World Cup.
But when Holland fans turned up on Friday to watch their team play the Ivory Coast, wearing the garish trousers, officials from Fifa were not amused.

The lederhosen carry the name of a Dutch beer, Bavaria.

The only problem is that the Dutch brewery which makes Bavaria is not an official World Cup sponsor. And so, in one of the most surreal incidents of the World Cup so far, stadium officials in Stuttgart made the supporters take their trousers off - leaving many of them to watch Holland's 2-1 victory in their underpants.

"They put our trousers in the bin," said an aggrieved Peer Swinkels, the chairman of Bavaria, Holland's second biggest brewery. "Fans going into the stadium had to dump them in a big container. Fifa said that the supporters could get them back afterwards. But the container was full of rubbish so most people didn't bother. I understand that Fifa wants to protect its sponsors. But this is very strange."

Critics say the decision to make more than 1,000 Dutch fans strip off last Friday is evidence of the extraordinary lengths to which Fifa has gone to protect the interests of World Cup sponsors - at the expense of ordinary fans. Fifa, however, says it has done nothing wrong and is entitled to defend itself against what it calls "ambush marketing".

"It's ridiculous," said Sjoerd Schreurs, a Dutch supporter who had to take his trousers off. "I queued for 25 minutes to get in. When I reached the front, an official told me: 'You're not getting in like that'. I took my trousers off. I managed to chuck them over the fence to some friends. But another official spotted them and took them away.'

"I watched the game in my pants," Mr Schreurs, 33, added. "Fortunately I had quite a long T-shirt."

Mr Swinkels dreamed up the idea of orange Leeuwenhose, or lion trousers, last year. Dutch fans who purchased 12 cans of Bavaria beer could buy the trousers for just €7.95 (they come with the tail of a lion, Holland's national symbol, and two extra large pockets for storing beer cans).
Holland's biggest brewery, Heineken, the official sponsor of the Dutch football association, didn't like the trousers either. It took legal action against Bavaria but lost - after a Dutch judge ruled that fans could wear whatever they wanted.

Mr Swinkels has written to Fifa's president, Sepp Blatter, asking whether Dutch fans would have to remove their trousers again when Holland take on Argentina on Wednesday in Frankfurt. "Since when can a sponsor determine what supporters wear?" he wrote, pointing out: "Orange clothing and symbols are part of the national heritage of the Netherlands."

Honestly, I wish I were a lawyer. You better believe somebody's gonna be looking for compensation. (Also, it's like your grandma says: "Never leave the house wearing shabby drawers -- you might get into a car accident." Now we know she was right to be paranoid.)