Finding the Football Fan in Me
I remember sitting down as football returned in the ‘first’ lockdown in England. It was a game streamed live from South Korea on Copa90’s YouTube channel. I sat down to watch and as the game went on, the realisation that the football fan I once was, or at least I thought I once was, has been changing for years.
As you break football down bit by bit to the bare bones of what the game is, then you start to find out more about yourself as a football fan. Football stripped back down to its core of 22 people kicking a ball around a field, controlled by a referee in the middle, becomes a pretty mundane concept in my mind. A lack of substance and character. A lack of emotional value.
During this pandemic, I had a lot of realisations about myself as a person. The first is that as a creative person, I was too busy being focused on how to monetise what I do rather than producing art for the fulfilment and enjoyment of doing so. The second? Well, that is a realisation that crumbles the very being I once thought I was throughout my teenage years.
In school, I remember sitting in an English classroom with a close mate and our English teacher producing a YouTube podcast, focusing on the analysis of the weekend’s games and transfer stories. From this came my urge to be a football journalist and from then, that is what I pursued. My focus was entirely on the happenings on the pitch, the transfer stories off the pitch and exploring tactical analysis too. Part of me still wishes I stuck this out, pursuing that journalism career I devoted myself too.
But I didn’t. As I ventured through high school and sixth form, my desire to become a journalist collapsed. It went from this pure addiction to football, sitting in on Friday and Saturday nights to stream whatever game I could get a hold of, to a shift in focus and a differing of interests.
The finding of the football fan within me has been a journey through time of ups and downs, where I have become strongly uninterested in football and instead looked to other interests to obsess over. I undertook a marketing degree due to my falling out with the strenuous culture of football journalism. I took this pathway because as I grew from high school student to young adult, I became a lot more creative. I started photography. I started designing stuff. I was more fascinated by art and all that surrounds it rather than analysis, writing and breaking news. In terms of football, this went from the on-pitch stuff to the sidelines, where we see fan culture and the creativity within the scene. This shift in focus put me on an endeavour to truly find what football means to me and why I have dedicated my whole life to it.
I think one of my current fallings out with football centres around elitism. As football has been shifting from its working-class roots to be ruined by the top-level greedy capitalists who run it, the more I have fallen out of love. When I watched Real Madrid win back to back Champions Leagues or when a discussion over a European Super League started to gain pace, I knew the reason why I am a football fan was going to alter. The big chiefs in football are sucking the soul out of the game. I hate it. I suppose I am combining my left-wing political ideologies with my football fandom but I hate the fact that the people in the game have to suffer whilst the rich line the pockets with their money. I suppose as I developed my political stance, this influenced my love for the game.
Growing as a person has made me focus more on the importance of fan culture, the need for a culture surrounding the game and how this whole aspect of football is the main driver of why this game is so good. Watching the football during a pandemic just proves how, without fans, football has no substance. I love German football. The reason? The fans and the fan culture they have in the game. The pandemic showcased a potential dystopia in football that I’d not shy away from predicting being almost inevitable.
And as I have been finding the fan within me, it hasn’t just been this aspect, where I look to fan culture rather than the pitch. It’s the players themselves that have been pushing me away from the game I once loved. No footballers, for reasons off the pitch, interest me one little bit. I constantly look backwards. I look backwards towards Diego Maradona, Socrates and Johan Cruyff. Why? Because my heart needs more than what football is offering today. Instead of watching the football on the weekend, I am diving into Maradona documentaries. Or I am watching games from the World Cup in 1986. Or I’m learning more about Socrates as a character. I long for this historic football input into my life because I have nothing to look forward to as the hope for a game I can love again climbs higher and higher away from my reach.
I suppose I have become lost. Lost as a football fan, strolling aimlessly through historical archives to feel something again. I guess I could say that awful cliche of ‘being born in the wrong generation’, but what if I actually was? In this pandemic I found the football fan in me again, he just so happened to be born in the ‘70s.
