Football, ey. Jumpers for goalposts. You know, marvellous. Photo: OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images
In October last year, I was in a pub meeting a very old friend, someone I hadn’t seen since school; we had bumped into each other in north London and agreed to go for a drink. My diary management is dreadful, so I hadn’t realised that I’d arranged to see him on a night when Liverpool were playing Arsenal in the League Cup.
My old friend was surprised to see me so emotionally invested in the match. It was a bloody hard game not to get invested in: fixture congestion meant that Liverpool had to field the reserves — four teenagers started the match — and it ended up 5-5, with Liverpool winning on penalties. Eventually, perhaps because I was constantly distracted and staring over his shoulder, he asked me something that I’d never been asked before and which I had to think a lot about. “Tell me,” he said: “Explain it to me. Why do you like football? What do you get out of it?”
He, like me, had been a Warhammer-playing, model-aeroplane-building nerd at school; neither he nor I had had the slightest interest in football. Nerds of a certain kind have a sort of superior attitude towards sports in general and football in particular — they call them/it “sportsball”, and sniff dismissively about people competing to see how hard they can kick a ball. (“But if all that’s true, then football … is a game!”)
I was probably one of them; but in my late teens and early 20s I changed. I’ve now been a Liverpool fan for more than 20 years, having gone to university in the city. I’m a bit of a plastic, in that I’ve only been to a dozen or so matches in that time, but it matters to me; I am grumpier when they lose and happier when they win.
But I don’t think I’d ever stopped to think about why. It is objectively quite strange that I invest a small but real amount of my happiness in the number of times a group of men whom I have never met can put a ball into a net 180 miles away from me. It’s a medium-sized part of my identity; I say “we” won at the weekend, as though I had anything to do with it. It’s as if, in Mitchell and Webb’s words, I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and started talking about how “we” had defeated the Nazis.
Now that football’s back, and Liverpool are champions, I wanted to look at the answer I gave my friend; to try and interrogate what it is that I get from it. In short, I wanted to try to explain football to nerds.
The most obvious explanation for football fandom is that it’s a sort of emotional gambling. You bet a small amount of psychological wellbeing on whether your team will win or not. If they don’t, it makes you sad; if they do, it makes you happy. A good win in the early Saturday kickoff can genuinely improve the mood of the whole weekend; conversely, a crucial defeat can make me several percentage points less fun to be around.
There’s a bit of research that suggests that football fans suffer more pain from losses than they get joy from winning, and that’s been taken as meaning that football fandom is irrational, as in a rational actor would not make the choice to be a football fan in the first place; much as it is economically irrational to play blackjack, because in the long run the house always wins. I’m sceptical of happiness/wellbeing research, but intuitively that feels about right — nonetheless, I think it misses the point.
At the risk of ending up in Pseuds’ Corner, the utilitarian calculus around football fandom isn’t limited to the individual games, and whether they add or subtract to your Happiness Points. There’s more going on.
First, here are long-term payoffs. Sure, most league seasons are a trudge, and most cup runs end in disappointment, but every so often something happens which you treasure forever, and which becomes part of your memory of a period of your life. A few games — England thrashing Germany 5-1 in 2001; Liverpool’s Miracle of Istanbul in 2005; last season’s extraordinary turnaround against Barcelona — become joyful little memories partly separate from the real-world stuff of work and family, that contain all their value within them.
Then there is the obvious point that watching the games themselves has a joy in the form of watching people who are just incredibly good at their jobs. There is a skill to watching football — to appreciating the skill involved (much as there is a skill in appreciating concert pianists, a skill which incidentally I lack entirely).
This isn’t football-specific. You can get that with anything; the format is somewhat irrelevant. I’m terrible at chess, but I can appreciate a beautiful move or a clever checkmate. If I happened to be a fan of Fortnite I could get it from watching Fortnite matches on Twitch. Or rugby. People being good at stuff is pleasing to see. And sport involves not just physical skill but mental; watching Steph Curry, the basketball star, effortlessly recall details plucked from any of the hundreds of games he’s played is honestly astonishing. His expertise (LeBron James does the same thing) allows him to view the game in such a high-level way that is opaque to those of us who don’t understand it.
But I think there is a particular beauty in football, especially the sheer, feathery, delicate precision of a beautiful first touch. People talk too much about goals in football. A goal blasted in from 30 yards is impressive, but I think if you want to show someone the aesthetic beauty of the game, the best thing to show them is the way a footballer uses their body to control the ball.
There’s a pragmatic reason to be a fan, too, which is that football is a sort of lingua franca, especially for men. Its ubiquity makes it valuable. If you’re fluent in it, you have a ready-made topic of conversation with a majority of men (and a significant minority of women) almost anywhere in the world.
I went on a river safari in Borneo, on honeymoon in 2012, and was chatting away to the Malaysian porters about how good a signing Robin van Persie was for Man Utd. When you’re put at a table at a wedding with a bunch of people you don’t know, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to strike up a conversation about what’s gone wrong at Arsenal in the last decade or so. Those embarrassing moments when someone comes to fix the boiler and middle-class dads find themselves dropping their aitches and saying “innit” become much less awkward if there’s a mutual appreciation of what a good job Jurgen Klopp’s done.
I have male friends who don’t enjoy football and it’s just that little bit harder for them to find conversation-starter topics with strangers. Relatedly, if you’re a boy who’s good at football, it’s a fairly cast-iron defence against bullying at school. It’s a bit cold-eyed, but for a boy in Britain, there are good practical reasons to be interested in football.
Football has been off for lockdown; Liverpool were just two wins from their first league title in 30 years. But it started again recently. And last week, Man City lost to Chelsea. They did so in hapless style, via a calamitous bit of defending from their own corner, allowing Christian Pulisic to run the length of the pitch and score, and a comedy handball on the line which led to a penalty and red card. That defeat ended even the mathematical possibility that City could retain the Premier League, and handed us the championship.
The circumstances make it all a bit surreal. Liverpool are simultaneously the earliest ever Premier League winners with seven games to spare — and the latest, with the league not decided until 25th June. But I’ll watch them be awarded the trophy at Man City’s ground when they play them on Thursday, and I’ll cheer and drink with friends and it’ll be fun. And that, I’ll explain to my nerd friend if and when I see him again, is what I get out of it.
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SubscribeSo what does that say about those of us who can appreciate both footballers and concert pianists?
Hi Tom, as someone born 2 miles from Anfield into a family of Liverpool supporters – (except for my mother who was always suspected of being a closet Evertonian) and who attended his first match in 1966 and travelled all over England and Europe with LFC I’m sure you would understand that my perspective on the issue of ‘football’ differs a little from yours.
LFC was for me a very local preoccupation which bound me into my community and family. Match attendance was an expression and a performance of a unique local working class culture made special (and to many made dangerous) by its combination of hard won knowledge of the world garnered not from formal learning but from seafaring and a celtic temperament quick to fists but also mercifully quicker to laughter.
Much of this has now been lost although faint echoes are still very occasionally detectable.
Many would argue of course that much has also been gained but i can never wholly reconcile myself to the fact that the support of a football club appears to be an intellectual decision these days the visible manifestation of which is the expensive purchase and wearing of a football shirt bearing on its back the surname of some here today gone tomorrow millionaire.
My first scarf was knitted for me by my granma….
I no longer attend Anfield unwilling to have my heritage sold back to me by slick strangers fulfilling the requirements of a 5 year business plan and don’t get me started on the latest Black Lives Matter nonsense….
So I’ve stopped Sky and BT with their overwrought, hyped up, expensive coverage of what is after all only a game…..but a game it should be said that contained a universe for me invisible to the slick suits and well heeled mountebanks who now control it.
I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…..
all the best,don’t forget never to walk alone now, I’m off to the park to watch the kids play goalie on the spot.
F**k football
Putting the name and Taking the knee for a woke/cutural Marxist organisation that wants to overthrow the west, destroy the nuclear family, overthrow capitalism and effectively racial segregate the world.
Never again you virtue signalling, two faced, subservient, Anti English, middle class, over educated woke idiots
Perfectly encapsulated!
To one who knows next to nothing about Football it does seem that the higher the salaries of these prima donna’s, the stupider they are. As to the bending of the knee, why not the full Kowtow?
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I love football and still spend much of my life thinking about it, worrying about, watching it, and playing it – even at the age of 54 I play twice a week. Today I am concerned about the fact that Andre Wisdom, who plays for my beloved Derby County, has been stabbed and is in hospital. (Well, he did go back to Toxteth in a nice car – perhaps the nice car that he drove into a river when following the GPS navigation system to his first match at Pride Park).
But as long ago as 1996 I resolved not to put any money directly into British football, the influence of big money and agents etc already being poisonous in my view. And of course these things are 1000 time worse now. So, I won’t pay to watch matches and I don’t have any TV subscriptions (or indeed a TV). I will buy a ginger ale in the pub to watch what our undoubtedly some very good footballers and very exciting matches. That said, I have almost come to prefer half-listening to the commentaries on 5Live while reading, then watching the highlights on YouTube.
And I agree with Andrew Best below that it is disgusting to watch all these idiots take the knee for a Marxist organisation whose stated aim is to destroy our society. The mansions of the footballers will not be sacrosanct should BLM come to power.
In the late 1960s when ordinary Britons were first able to visit the USSR, I went on a tour with my parents and as a part visited Tibilisi in Georgia. During the bus tour we passed a mosaic depicting a Georgian story ( I can’t remember whether it was history or legend) but the tour chose not to stop to allow a photo.
After the evening meal Dad decided he wanted a photo so he and I and another keen photographer on the tour walked to where the mosaic was which took us about three quarters of an hour. As it was dark Dad had brought along his tripod to take a timed exposure. Just as we were nearly finished we were surrounded by a group of about 30 young men. They spoke no English and we spoke no Russian but it was obvious that they were intrigued by Dad’s photographic kit, looking through the viewfinder and examining the tripod and various other bits and pieces. We finished what we were doing but were a bit apprehensive about being able to repossess our equipment when suddenly one of them managed to ask us where we were from. “Wales”, answered Dad and it was not surprising that that didn’t mean anything. At this point the easiest thing would have been to say England as that would certainly been understood, but Dad was a proud Welshman so he explained by using football talk. ” John Charles”, he said naming a famous Welsh international player who was one of the first First Division players to play in Italy. Suddenly they began to smile and named one of their players. Dad knew this game and names flew back and forth until Dad had retrieved and packed away his kit at which point the young men summoned a taxi and with many good wishes told the driver to take us back to the hotel. Incidentally it turned out the journey was free. Ah, the international power of ‘football speak’!
Yes, I had a similar experience on New Year’s Eve in Russia, 1991. Sledding with a bunch of people outside the hotel I communicated by recalling the names of Russia footballers like Kuznetzov, Blokhin, Yashin etc.
Excellent article on football supporting but I’m somewhat unsettled to find the views expressed here about BLM. To start again, from reality this time: it’s not a single movement, it’s not marxist, and it’s not aiming to come to power. The full kowtow? What disturbed world do you exist in? Are you afraid of what might become of your own fragile status if the status of others is also recognised?
I was born and brought up in West Ham. My Dad took me to my first game when they were promoted to Division 1 back in 1958 and we beat Aston Villa 7-2. That was a high point and for 60 years since, unlike Tom, my weekends have been blighted by defeat. Over the last couple of years I began to question why this irrational association mattered to me, especially as there is little local representation in any of the premier league teams. I have gradually managed to close myself down to the weekly scores,although not enough to hide away from the probability of relegation this year. I do agree with Tom’s point about the sheer pleasure there is in watching sports people perform at the highest level but, of course, there isn’t much of that at West Ham. Perhaps that is why I am winning my battle to wean myself off professional football.
The obsessional attachment to a particular club can be damaging, especially when the core objective of the club is to take money off you.
“A goal blasted in from 30 yards is impressive, but I think if you want to show someone the aesthetic beauty of the game, the best thing to show them is the way a footballer uses their body to control the ball.”
This really gets to the heart of why so many consider Messi superior to Ronaldo. Ronaldo is brutally impressive, freakishly effective at getting the ball into the net as often as possible. But Messi does 2 or 3 things every match that defy logic. Subtle movements, touches and passes that leave you wondering how a human managed that. He’ll take a touch of the ball that’ll make you laugh out loud in disbelief. I don’t think football would be the international phenomenon it is if it didn’t have that dimension to it, something that goes beyond simply winning and losing.
I agree with you. I thought the interplay of Messi, Xavi and Iniesta in the wonderful Barcelona team of a few years ago was just a joy to watch. I think Guardiola crafted perhaps one of the greatest teams ever. Shame he went to Abu Dhabi.