SLAC's Italian BaBarians celebrating their team's victory	Hamburg was full of blue goals celebrating the world cup (image courtesy of dpa)
Shiraz Habib from Trinindad and Deniz Sunar from Turkey, both physicists working on H1, on their way to the Trinidad-England match	One for the imagination: some men's toilets were decorated with these little goals – you had to try and score a goal, apparently.

If you were anywhere in Germany during the last month you couldn't have missed it: it was football world cup. Black-red-and-golden flags flying from windows, fluttering behind cars, decorating t-shirts, socks, beer mats, faces, shop windows, newspapers. If by chance you went to Hamburg you were greeted with a beautiful array of bright blue goals shining from every high-rise roof, harbour crane and all other landmarks in the city, and the public transport system didn't only tell you when the next train was due to arrive – it also had updates on the goals of every match that was on.

And if, while you were in Hamburg, you paid a visit to DESY during a match you could hear the noise from the nearby football stadium through the trees. Sometimes the voice of HCal expert Erika Garutti would drift through the trees as well: on the morning of the day of the Italy – Czech Republic match in the Hamburg stadium, the organisers suddenly appeared at the DESY gates, desperate: they urgently needed an Italian to read and record announcements for the Italian football fans. Erika stopped preparing the HCal's shipment to CERN for a while and will go down in history as the voice who says in Italian 'Please have your bags ready for security checks.'

The world cup was also present on the DESY campus: people wore shirts of every nation imaginable, and flags were draped around office doors and over desks. And sometimes, from behind closed meeting room doors, you'd hear shouting and screaming because some clever PhD student had managed to connect the laptop to the TV to the beamer and even directors joined the ad-hoc football 'meetings'.

The evening matches were shown in the bistro

Excitement during the game between Germany and Ecuador

Little did Marcella Capua know that her office decoration would win her the world cup!

A large contingent of Fermilab kept up with the intense ups and downs of the FIFA World Cup, including Fermilab Director Pier Oddone, who grew up in Latin America playing soccer.

Democratic viewing for everybody – the scientist's way

And for those who like a bit more science with their football here are some interesting nature articles!

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7095/full/441793a.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v442/n7099/full/442110b.html

-- Barbara Warmbein