TRUE COLOURS
To fully establish your credentials you need to choose a team to support. You can then identify yourself at an early stage in any football conversation as a fan of that club. This will present your companions with an instantly available collection of pre-set comments about your team. In this way football fans avoid the need for such tiresome conventions as having a personality.
It will be far easier to take part in discussions about the current state of football if you pick a team from the Premier League. This is where most media attention is focused.
Geographical proximity is not, contrary to popular opinion, the only acceptable reason for supporting a club. Many fans’ allegiances are decided in childhood by quite sentimental factors; they will, for example, pick the team supported by Uncle Alf.
But never confuse being sentimental about the game with trivialising it. Accordingly, you should not use any of the following criteria when deciding which club to support:
However your decision is made, it is imperative that once you start supporting a team you stick with them. If they have a bad run of form and slip down the league table, do not desert them for a better team, cynically swapping clubs in a desperate bid for success. That’s the players’ job.
DISCUSSING YOUR TEAM WITH OTHER SUPPORTERS
The best way to gain acceptance among your fellow fans is by exhibiting a miserable fatalism about your team’s chances. Genuine fans care nothing for the cheerily enthusiastic demeanour of those who have jumped on football’s bandwagon in recent years. Instead they see their team as a cross to be borne, a spectre which has blighted their lives since childhood, but which nevertheless holds a strange power over them.
Useful phrases as you discuss your team with a fellow fan include, ‘City were useless again on Saturday’ (or, in the event of a win, ‘City were lucky again on Saturday’); ‘We’re never going to do anything with Bloggs as manager’ (or, if Bloggs has just been replaced, ‘We should never have got rid of Bloggs’); and, ‘We’ve got to switch to playing three at the back’ (or, if you have been playing three at the back, ‘We’ve got to switch to playing four at the back’).
You should find out who your team’s local rivals are, so that appropriate venom can be employed when mentioning their name. Newcastle, for example, loathe (and are loathed by) Sunderland. There’s not much love lost between Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday. Spurs despise Arsenal, and vice-versa. In Bristol the hatred is between Rovers and City. Manchester United’s most bitter enemy is Manchester City (and given how deeply the rest of the country dislike them that’s saying something). When two local rivals play each other, the match is called a ‘derby’ – except by the police, who label it a ‘threat to public order’.
The best way to gain acceptance among your fellow fans is by exhibiting a miserable fatalism about your team’s chances.
But sometimes (if rarely) local fans will put aside their differences for the love of the game, demonstrated by the story of the obsessive Newcastle United fan whose long-suffering wife says to him: ‘You know, I think you love Newcastle more than you love me.’ ‘Newcastle?’ he replies. ‘I love Sunderland more than I love you.’
DISCUSSING FOOTBALL WITH SUPPORTERS OF OTHER TEAMS
As well as following your own club, you need to keep abreast of football in general so that you can discuss the game with fans of other teams.
A cunning approach is to adopt a position on the latest issue that differs from the prevailing wisdom. Those listening to you will assume that you must know something they don’t, and so will take you to be a true expert on the game. It is vital, however, that you refrain from taking this approach too far. You can safely venture the opinion, for instance, that David Beckham was of greater value in central midfield than when playing on the right; but it would be foolhardy to claim that he couldn’t hit a barn door from five paces.
TRANSFER RUMOURS
The explosion of media interest in football has meant that broadcasters and newspapers need a constant supply of stories to fill their bulletins, pages and websites. As a result, the slightest rumour, no matter how unlikely, of a particular player being interested in signing for a particular club is pounced upon and disseminated as though it is gospel truth. The rise of Twitter has made this process even more fevered than before.
While 90% of these alleged transfers never stand a chance of actually happening, such is the football fan’s capacity for self-deception that he persuades himself that any rumoured transfer of a player to his team is about to be completed within hours. The latest Brazilian World Cup sensation wants to play in Europe? Successful and glamorous clubs like Chelsea and Real Madrid are favourites to complete his signing – but still the Grimsby Town fan holds his breath. After all, a Brazilian wunderkind called Juninho turned up to play more than 100 games for Middlesbrough.
STATISTICS
One device newspapers have adopted in their quest to fill the column inches of their football pages is the convoluted use of statistics. In an in-depth analysis of teams’ performances, they will compute pieces of information of doubtful relevance like the number of passes completed by a side within their own half compared with the number of passes completed within the opposition’s half. You should ignore these statistics. Nowhere in the rules of football does it say that the side completing more passes within their own half shall gain any advantage whatsoever. Ask any Arsenal fan.
SUPERSTITIONS
To exhibit the irrationality that marks the true football fan, you should develop a superstition which you indulge on match days. This is a set routine that you must perform, or an item of clothing you must wear, which once coincided with a victory for your team and which you now repeat in the fear that not doing so will prejudice their chances.
But be careful to pick a superstition that is simple to replicate. It is far easier to rely on the fact that you wore a particular pair of socks when your team won, or that you had Cornflakes rather than Rice Krispies for breakfast, than on the fact that you redecorated your spare room that week.
Clearly, the actions of someone completely unconnected with a team can have no possible effect on that team’s performance. The fact that you tap the same lamp post on your way to the ground every week will in no way increase your side’s chances of victory. But still you do it. You did it the day 12 years ago when they won 3 – 0, and have never stopped doing it since. Admittedly, you tell yourself, they have lost many of the subsequent matches. But would they have lost by even more if you hadn’t tapped the post? These are the illogical insecurities of the true football fan.
And not just the fan. Players have also become famous for their superstitions. The ex-Manchester United and England star Paul Ince, for example, never put his shirt on until he was running on to the pitch (which is technically a yellow card offence.). This explains why he became such a favourite among female fans. Another ex-England footballer with his own pre-match ritual was Barry Venison: ‘I always used to put my right boot on first, and then obviously my right sock.’
PHRASES
A number of phrases have been used so often in football discussions over the decades that they have taken on the status of cliché. Bluffers should therefore take great care to avoid using any of them, unless you make it abundantly clear that you’re being ironic:
‘It’s a funny old game.’
‘We’re over the moon.’
‘I’m sick as a parrot.’
‘It only takes a minute to score a goal.’
‘We were robbed’ (unless your team were playing in Liverpool, when this will be true in the literal sense).
It is, however, useful to have a stock phrase lined up and ready for use in any conversation about football, such as that used by the erstwhile Coventry, Southampton, Celtic, Middlesbrough and current Scotland manager Gordon Strachan: ‘Football’s a simple game – it’s just the players who make it complicated.’