Kaliningrad in March is still not much of a place for walks. A wet wind, a scarf pulled up to the nose, a hood over the hat, a grey sky in which even Saturday looks like the middle of a working week. But if a child has been promised football, no weather is an argument any more. He hops through the puddles anyway, tugs at your sleeve and treats every Baltika poster on the way as a personal invitation.
We go to the match not simply as father and son but as people with their own ritual. For me a trip to Baltika is a way to spend two hours being the person who has supported the club since childhood again. For him it is a great adventure with a stadium, noise, tea, a hot dog and a dad who for some reason becomes far more emotional than at home.
We enter the heated sector as if into a separate world. Behind the glass doors there's a warm-air curtain, light, movement and a dozen kids playing football in the corridor while the adults discuss the starting line-up and the latest results. Mine is almost six. The height of the stand is enough for him to see the pitch, but something else matters more: here you can go inside at any moment, warm your fingers, kick a ball about with other small fans and come back out to the roar of the stadium.
For him Baltika isn't only a team. It's a place where it's warm, where you can run, get tired, come back and be part of the game again.
He walks out onto the stand, draws himself up to his full height and yells: "BALTIKAAAAAA!" So loud and piercing that people turn round and smile. For a few seconds he is the chief cheerleader, the little ringleader of the family sector, sincerely convinced that if you shout loudly enough the team is bound to hear.
Ten minutes later the same voice is whispering: "Dad, everyone shouts so loudly here, can I go and have a rest?"
At six it's impossible to hold one emotion for a whole match. Impossible to constantly put up with the noise, sit still and not get tired of the people around you. An adult fan is used to thinking a game has to be "endured". A child doesn't think that way. For him, love of football isn't measured by the ability to sit through it from whistle to whistle.
That's why the family sector matters so much. Not as a tick in the "convenience" box, but as a normal human environment where a child doesn't have to be a miniature copy of an adult fan. You can miss a chunk of the game and still feel you were properly at the stadium.
I understand only too well how this experience differs from mine.
I started supporting Baltika in March 1994. I was almost ten, we had recently moved to the city from a village, my parents didn't watch football, and for a comically long time I didn't know it even existed. Friends dragged me to my first match, at the old stadium, where only the South Stand had a roof, and even that didn't stretch all the way: the lower rows still got soaked in the Kaliningrad rain. The North and West stands got soaked completely; fans sat on wooden benches, cracked sunflower seeds, and some drank vodka with dried fish in full view of the children.
Back then it felt like part of a big celebration. Now you realise how rough that football was to the touch.
Decades have passed since then. The stadium has changed, the benches have become seats, the fan's daily life has become more civilised. But in essence I'm taking my son to the same place I was once taken. Only now, instead of a soaked stand, he has a heated sector; instead of blokes with dried fish, tea and a hot dog; and instead of the feeling that "kids are here by accident", the sense that they belong here by default.
A separate chapter of our family Baltika: the first away trip.
This spring the three of us, my wife, my son and I, went to St Petersburg for Zenit vs Baltika. For me it was the familiar story of the journey, the stadium and an attempt to grab points off the favourite. For my wife, St Petersburg is still associated with ballet rather than football, so over one weekend we struck a compromise: a performance for her, the game for my son and me.
One evening we sat in an enormous hall and watched people in tutus act out their stories to an orchestra. The next evening other people acted out theirs on the grass.
At the Gazprom Arena my son once again first shouted "BALTIKAAAA!" and then hid from the scale of it, only now in someone else's city and at a different stadium. We weren't part of an organised group; we were among other people's fans.
"Dad, can the team hear us here too?"
That question perfectly contains everything away trips are for, for adults and for almost-six-year-olds alike. For me it was another away day. For him it was proof that Baltika exists not only in Kaliningrad. That you can travel to other cities for it, just as you do for the sea or the theatre.
When Baltika attacks, he doesn't follow the pattern of play but the way everything around him changes. People leap up, someone waves a scarf, someone grabs my sleeve, someone is already shouting in advance as if the ball were in the net. For him a match isn't combinations or possession stats but a huge wave of emotion that sweeps over everyone at once.
Sometimes that wave is too strong. After an especially nervy moment he asks: "Can I sit inside for a bit?"
At moments like that it becomes especially clear that a child at the stadium isn't just a cute little fan in a scarf. He's a separate person with his own sensitivity, fears and threshold of tiredness. We adults mask overload with irony, irritation, a strong word aimed at the referee. A child is more honest: at some point it all simply becomes too much at once, the people, the light, the sound, the emotions.
And if the club has a space where that can be lived through gently, then the club is doing something very important right.
There is one more tradition, one Baltika itself may not even suspect exists, but it works better than any official loyalty programme. Before the match my son asks: "Dad, if Baltika win, will we buy a toy?"
I nod, though I've long known how it will end. Sometimes Baltika win. Sometimes they don't. The toy appears either way.
For him it's all simple. We came to the football, cheered for our team, shouted, worried, drank tea, went out to rest, came back in, so after all that the day ought to end with something good. Not necessarily a win.
In a child's logic, football can't be a completely bad evening just because the team lost. If we were together, if there was a stadium, if his "BALTIKAAAA!" rang out again, if on the way home a bag with a new toy car or dinosaur is rustling in his hands, then it was all worth it.
We adults too often tie our love for the club to the result alone. Win, and the week is bright; lose, and everything is irritating. It's different for a child. He doesn't yet know how to support by the league table. He supports by being there.
By the fact that we went together. That the stadium was warm after the cold street. That people smiled when he shouted. That you can go away for five minutes and then come back into the game.
Children like that aren't just the "family audience" in a report. They're the fans of the next twenty years. The ones who will one day grow up, start buying their own tickets, argue about transfers, bicker in the comments, celebrate wins as if the weather in the city depended on them, and perhaps later bring their own children to the stadium.
A great deal depends on that first experience. Not only whether they'll come again. But whether, years from now, the club will have that living fan base that no marketing trick can buy.
Baltika is already doing a lot right, if only by having a space where a child can be himself rather than endure a match as a test of character.
If the club keeps remembering six-year-olds like this, the ones who first yell "BALTIKAAAA!" and ten minutes later ask for a break, then it's betting not only on the next round. It's betting on its own future.
PS.1: There is, of course, plenty to work on to improve attendance, including among children. Here I've already written about it; there are ideas there, and some sensible comments too.
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PS.2: Ballet is interesting, of course, but not for everyone 😄
