Understanding Football*
or how to survive living with a football fan
*Before we start I need to be clear to my US readers that by football I mean soccer. Soccer is called football everywhere else in the world, so as part of my assimilation, I use football to mean ‘soccer’ and not, as the sport is called elsewhere, ‘American football.’ 😉
Recently two of Pete’s longtime friends from University spent the weekend with us. We talked about a lot of things, as longtime friends do, and we spent a lot of time talking about football. They are both avid and lifelong football fans, and one of them works for a football-related organisation. They grew up with football and still follow their childhood family teams. As does Pete. There was so much to talk about! And as League games were being played over the weekend, the landscape was changing and there was more to discuss. I was fascinated, and obviously out of my ‘League’ (yes, I just said that).
Had I grown up here in the UK, or if I had been 30 years younger in the US I might have been a football fan. From what I have learned, at least here in the UK, you are effectively born into your first club. You grow up supporting your Father’s team (or mother, but that was less common until recently). Your father’s team is the team whose journey and league standings you learn early. You go to the games if you are lucky, or to the pub near the grounds to watch on the telly with your tribe. It can be a club team, or a league team; it matters not. They are YOUR team and you grow up with them. Your fate is tied to their fate: their successes are yours to share; their failures, well that is the fault of the coach! Or possibly a bad call.
Not long after I started going out with Pete, we watched the movie Fever Pitch1, loosely based on the book by Nick Hornby. We saw the original version of Fever Pitch starring a very young Colin Firth, Ruth Gemmell and Mark Strong. The movie is about an English teacher in North London (Paul) who is a lifelong Arsenal football fan. He starts to date a fellow teacher (Sarah) and trouble ensues as she tries to make sense of his lifetime obsession with the team. There is a later, American remake of Fever Pitch with Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore where they change the sport to Baseball. I like that version too, and the storyline is a close mimic to the English version.
Although the film only loosely follows the book, either is required watching or reading if you are going to enter into any relationship with an English football fan. Having seen it certainly made my life with Pete a LOT more understandable. Like Paul in Fever Pitch, Pete is a lifelong Arsenal fan. The story also explained the relationship of football fans to their teams; I believe parts of the story actually should be included on the citizenship test.
Once you go away to university or otherwise move away from your family home (particularly if it is where your father also grew up), you may be in the position of choosing another team that is local to your new home. You can either switch allegiance altogether, or more likely just add another team to your personal roster. For example, you may support your ‘family’ Premier League team and also the club team in your town with its handy nearby pub.
Part of the attraction of supporting your local club is that you can probably walk to the games, the stadium may be quite small, and you may see the players walking around your town. The Pubs closest to the stadium are likely filled with supporters pre- and post-game, making it an easy club to join and participate in the social life.
For those of you who watched Ted Lasso2, a TV series about a US ‘American football’ coach hired by an English Premier League football club, the camaraderie among the fans who congregate at the local pub in Richmond gives you a tiny insight into the life of a fan.
For some, there are teams from other countries that you follow and support as well. Maybe one of your team’s favourite players got transferred to Club Atlético de Madrid, so now you follow that team. Or you visited Italy and saw a match in a small town so now you follow them. Maybe you spent a semester abroad in Lyon and saw a bunch of games and now you are an Olympic Lyonnaise. Whatever. Every country and region in the world has a football team so no excuses.
You can see how it all starts adding up, time-wise and knowledge-wise. Several times a year, the transfer window opens and there is the possibility that your team may pick up (or gasp-lose!) some players. This sort of thing preys on your mind. The only month that is generally ‘off’ is July. In August, the schedule for the season is set for the year. The pre-season friendly matches give you a chance to see what shape your players are in, and how they are recovering from last-season injuries. September is the opening of the season and away we go until May. June is reserved for European championships.
One of the most telling scenes in the movie Fever Pitch is when the protagonist is on an early date with his new love interest. They are walking along the street both lost in their own thoughts. She asks him eventually what he is thinking about. He pauses and then—remember he is an English teacher—he lies and says, D.H. Lawrence. She is startled, and she asks more questions which he tries to answer and eventually gives up, admitting that he was lying earlier and really he was thinking about a recent Arsenal game, his hopes for the season, and so on. She asks why he lied, and he says, “I have to vary the answers don’t I? I can’t always answer that I’m thinking about Arsenal.” For me, the first of many light bulbs went off.
For a real fan, there is a fantastic amount of mental time spent with the team off the pitch. There are all the articles and blog posts to read, analyses to consider and perhaps discuss with fellow fans. Specific players have injuries that need to be kept track of, and of course the rumours of transfers. This applies to your team as well as the whole League your team plays in, as each team’s fortunes will affect the others. When it comes to player and game strategies, many fans think the coach does not ever consult them (the quite knowledgeable fan) enough. At least that is what I’ve heard.
All of this overall strategic time is besides any time spent watching games themselves and reliving spectacular goals from games past. These can happen live, in videos, in match of the day replays, or even just during a lull in the day and a pleasant jog down memory lane.
Another major topic of discussion in the movie is the level of commitment given to the team over anything else in Paul’s life. Paul points out the relationship with his team is the longest relationship he has had in his life, after the one with his parents. He has wanted Arsenal to win the championship for eighteen years. He asks Sarah what has she wanted as long as that? She says that thankfully she doesn’t still want the things she wanted eighteen years earlier: David Cassidy and bigger breasts. And when Sarah points out that the relationship is entirely one-sided, he says at least he cares about something that is bigger than him. Caring about the game: the play, the players, and also the collective joy and excitement when they win are all what makes it worth the time spent.
It reminded me in a way of a line in the book The Little Prince. In that book, the fox tells the little prince that “it is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” So too, for all fans: the time, the attention, the emotion spent all make the team you follow so important.
I feel as if part of becoming a citizen of the UK means I am joining a culture that cherishes its football teams, from the pub clubs to the Premier Leagues, and everything in between. There is an immediacy and access to the sport that sometimes can be missing in the US, mostly due to the sheer size of everything around sport: the number of people and so many teams, the sizes of stadiums, the distances to travel to see teams playing in the bigger cities. In the UK it feels like almost everyone is a football fan or at least knowledgeable enough that it is, after the weather and gardening, almost the next most common topic to discuss.
Because this has already gone on long enough, and I know there are plenty of passionate sports fans in the US, I propose we meet here again next week to talk about a particular (or as some might say ‘peculiar’) US sport: baseball!
As ever, thanks so much for reading!
You know I love to hear your thoughts: football, sports, enthusiastic fans or anything else. If you have a favourite movie or book about football, I’d love to hear about that too! Mine are all referenced in the pictures or words above!
See you next week!
xx Sabrina
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fever_Pitch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Lasso
Love it! Love Nick Hornby, too, but now I have to rewatch the (original) movie, which I saw years ago but don’t remember well. Don’t tell Pete, but I blow hot and cold with English football; my real love is for AFC Ajax, the Amsterdam club which was the best in the world fifty years ago, with the young genius Johann Cruijff (check him out on YouTube) running the show on the pitch. Ajax is generally credited with inventing the fluid version of the game known as “total football,” and was also famous for developing a seemingly endless stream of brilliant young players, whom they then sold off for vast piles of money to bigger, richer clubs in Spain, England, Italy, etc. Ajax is by far the most successful Dutch club ever, having dominated the domestic league for decades, though the current season has been an uncharacteristically poor one.
The hereditary nature of fandom seems not to run in my family. My late father, who was Brazilian, was a boyhood fan of Flamengo, in Rio de Janeiro. And my son Tito has been obsessed with the Italian club Fiorentina, based in Florence, since a family trip to Tuscany when he was twelve. In fact, he runs a website and podcast dedicated to “La Viola” (as the club is known due to its purple kit). Three generations, three different clubs in three different countries….
I’ll shut up now, except to recommend a wonderful and thoroughly eccentric book by David Winner called Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football, originally published in 2000. It uses art history, architecture, the political radicalism of the 1960s, children’s literature, and more to explain the characteristics of Dutch football, and Dutch culture in general, and it’s one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books.
Fun to read! Similar experience with Nick and sailing. Though I didn’t know what I was signing up for until two full decades after we married 😎❤️