Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.

The Swiss Football Association published a map of its World Cup training camp this week, and most of it looks the way you’d expect. There’s a goalkeeper area behind the pitch, a gym under a marquee, a changing room tucked behind the gym. Then there’s the rest of the property, striped dark red and labeled “BEWARE OF RATTLESNAKES,” a zone larger than everything else on the map combined.

That means NO soccer players. (nflane/depositphotos)

The national team arrived in San Diego ahead of its opening match against Qatar and set up camp at the San Diego Jewish Academy in Carmel Valley, a private school whose campus backs onto canyon brush apparently rife with rattlesnakes. The Swiss responded as the Swiss respond to most threats: by drawing up a map with a precise border around the danger and vigorously declaring absolute neutrality. 

The squad is otherwise adjusted on schedule. The players coped with the humidity, slept at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar, and prepared for Qatar, a team that has never beaten a European side at a World Cup and whose entire country contains zero rattlesnakes. No player or staff member has reported actually seeing a snake, which means the most dangerous animal confirmed on the property remains an overly aggressive goalkeeper coach with a ball launcher.

If you zoom into the Swiss national flag, this is what you see. (swissnatimen/facebook)

Switzerland is not alone. Norway’s camp at the Grandover Resort & Spa in Greensboro, North Carolina, comes with its own copperhead advisory, which the city’s website describes as “very common” before instructing residents that “it is extremely dangerous to do anything other than leave them alone.” Midfielder Kristian Thorstvedt told reporters he was “not happy to hear this news,” which in his understated Scandinavian affect really means “help, we are all going to die.”

The World Cup runs June 11 through July 19, with 39 of the 48 team base camps scattered across the United States, each one parked next to whatever snakes the local ecosystem has on hand.