Two special days of football. Last night a clash between two of the most hypnotic teams in the game; this evening another potential humdinger, with Tottenham Hotspur attempting to create an unforgettable night at White Hart Lane en route to a place in the quarter-finals of the Champions League.
These are matches we all want to watch, at least those of us who love football. We watch not because we are necessarily fans of either team, but because we are caught up in the excitement, the hyperbole and the artistry. These are the matches for which neutrals tune in to the telly in their millions, vastly outnumbering the partisans.
But, even when watching the greatest of matches, we must acknowledge that neutrality has its limitations. It is a fact not so much of sport as of psychology that such games will never quite get the juices flowing, the blood pressure surging, the mouth drying, the pulse racing and the vitriol flying as much as when “our team” is playing. When our boys are out there. Our club. Our tribe.
“Who do you support?” The question is familiar in every footballing nation on the planet. It is a question that not merely ascertains someone’s allegiance, it also helps us to place them in a wider context, to understand something of their identity, to comprehend a little of how they will be feeling, wherever they are in the world, when the results come in at ten to five, or whenever, on a Saturday afternoon.
It is not that watching matches as a partisan is more enjoyable than as a neutral. In many ways, it is not enjoyable at all. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that enjoyment is not strictly relevant to a bona fide fan. It is about pain and anguish, ecstasy and belonging.
Advertisement
As one fan put it on an internet forum: “I don’t go to football to have fun, but to suffer.” The forum, incidentally, was for fans of Brentford FC.
I once had a friend who was so caught up with his team that he could no longer bear to watch their matches. He simply tuned into Final Score and experienced a surge either of relief or despondency, which, in the latter case, morphed into defiance by the time he reached the bar for a few pints. “You are taking it too far,” I said. “I know. I wish I didn’t care so much,” he replied. “But you can’t take the passion out of me any more than you could yank out my beating heart.”
Tony Evans, football editor of The Times, wrote a memoir devoted to his obsession with Liverpool. In Far Foreign Land he describes the irrationalities of his love for his club and the pain and loathing that accompany it. “There are people who contend that the state of obsession that many of us exist with is an affectation, a lifestyle choice. It’s not. Right from the beginning, from the first moment that my consciousness registered as a memory, I’ve known that it is part of my being. And it can skew the way you look at life.”
But to what, precisely, does a fan owe his or her allegiance? To the players? Well, of course not. Players come and go, mercenaries in the global capitalist enterprise that football has become. To the manager? But managers come and go, too, animated by precisely the same tendencies as the players. To the stadium? But clubs change stadiums, and not just the small clubs. Manchester City moved from Maine Road and Southampton from The Dell. Even Liverpool fans acknowledge that they should abandon their spiritual home at Anfield to help in their pursuit of further trophies.
Clubs, it would seem, can change pretty much everything — staff, location, playing style, strategy, owners, perhaps even their spots — and still retain the allegiance of fans, with only a few caveats. It is almost as if devotion transcends any concrete thing. It is eternal, moulding itself to the ever-changing circumstances of the club, even to the point of total metamorphosis.
Advertisement
The fluidity of footballing devotion has been scientifically measured. In an experiment carried out by Robert B. Cialdini, an American psychologist, fans of an American football team were asked to describe the outcome of a game. Half the fans were questioned about a game their team had lost a few weeks earlier, while the other half were asked about a match their team had won.
Cialdini was not interested in the result of the match per se but merely in the pronouns used by the fans when talking about it. He found that fans talking about a team that had won used the word “we” to describe the match. But those talking about a match their team that had lost started to use the word “they” instead. One particularly ardent fan, talking about the players, said (my italics): “They threw away our chance to win the championship.”
This is partly about the power of association, of course — fans wanting to identify with winners and dissociate themselves from losers — but it is about much more. It is about the capacity of fans to abstract from players, managers and anything else and to identify instead with a thing untainted by any of its possible associations. In that sense, football fandom is rather like religion or patriotism — powerful precisely because it is elusive and indefinable.
Of course, many fans are able to watch their teams without enduring the agonies of the damned, and that is all well and good. But, by definition, there has never been a fan who has watched a game with perfect equanimity.
Watching football as a neutral may indeed be wonderful, particularly when a match is intricate and artistic or fast and furious. But it is also a little like being an atheist at a carol service. You may enjoy the songs and the liturgy, but it is only true believers who can experience epiphany.