The University of Michigan American football team lost Saturday, Nov. 30, to their rival Ohio State, 56-27, for the NCAA regular season. For the uninitiated, one statistic is particularly worth remembering: 112,701 spectators attended the meeting, most of them dressed in yellow and blue, the colors of the Wolverines. Unimaginable in the European conception of sport and the university, this affluence is very ordinary in Ann Arbor. This November 30 was the 293rd consecutive game at Michigan Stadium played in front of more than 100,000 people.
The current series dates back to 1975. However, Ann Arbor, a small town located about fifty kilometers west of Detroit, at the last census only had 121,890 inhabitants, slightly less than Lausanne or Bern. About a third of these residents are students living on the University of Michigan campus. The stadium, erected in 1927 in the style of the era – a vast flared oval open to the four winds – is the largest in the United States and the second largest in the world. By comparison, the largest stadium in the National Football League (NFL), MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, which hosts the New York franchises of the Giants and Jets, has only 82,500 seats.
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