The analogy with nationalism is more than helpful metaphor though; it’s exactly the same thing. Like nationalism, football fandom claims to have chosen you – you were brought up to be a fan of a club rather than the other lot down the road. It runs in the family and can’t be learnt or adopted. You either are, or you aren’t. You have to make sacrifices for it, and a degree of suffering is all the better. Earning your scars, for club and country, takes you to another level.
Unfortunately, like the uber-Englishman, there are annoyingly so very few of them about these days. No matter; when the truth conflicts with the legend, we know which one to go with. But why?
National Identity or fan identity are still fundamentally the same thing – out of all the groups in all the world, you chose this one. But what defines it? Simply, who’s not in it. The boundaries are where the interest is. It’s a deconstructive commonplace to know that dyads need each other. But there’s more to be found. What is being English? It’s obviously not about being French, or German. But it’s not about a passport, or place of birth, so that definition only goes so far. You can exclude everyone who chooses not include themselves. Which means that you exclude everyone who supports someone else. But the ones who come in for the biggest policing are the boundary makers – the borderline.
In nationality, that means those who claim to be British, but have some baggage they haven’t discarded. Usually, it means someone not white. Or not Christian. Or not born here. But unpick these and you get something fundamentally illogical. Nationality is contested, fought over and only defined by those it excludes; everyone inside the corral is OK. In a nutshell – you’re either with us, or against us, but we reserve the right to decide some of those who are for us are actually against. The Tebbit test. In football, this is those fans that are spied at the ground and identified as newcomers. Those who cheer for the team in a pub, or profess fidelity despite not being particularly ‘out and proud’ about it before. These are the potential interlopers, treated with suspicion until they can be interrogated and their faith examined before the inquisition.
So far, so analogous. But aside from rhetorical similarities, is this a problem? The answer, and point of this piece, is to say answer with a resounding yes. It springs from the same well as nationalism though – lazy thinking and arbitrary boundary drawing. Lazy thinking should always be pointed out and fought against, and exclusion is a bad thing. And more to the point, it’s not good for the game.
For starters, real fandom leads to bores. Knowing the shared knowledge of the group – the great moments in the club’s history – is one thing; obsessively knowing the tedious detail of the reserves’ progress in the 1964 Combination League is quite another. But due to the subject matter, it’s hard to criticise such monomania; everyone knows it’s boring, but everyone knows it’s something that proves how much of a real fan the bore actually is.
More than anything else though, it’s a refusal to get with the way of the world. It’s a concept based in the rhythms of a life and game long-since past. In an age of mass-production and mass-employment, it was far more understandable to have such boundaries of real fandom, for the simple reason that they were far more true. Jobs, houses and football clubs were for life. The standard narrative, of being taken to a game by your Dad was the norm, not jumpers-for-goalposts nostalgia.
But that age isn’t with us anymore. We now move all over the country. The decline in football crowds in the post-war period means than numerically, far, far fewer people got taken by their Dads than they used to. The ways in which people become fans of clubs is changing but the language of fandom hasn’t yet caught up with it.
Is anyone less of a fan for not going to games? What about the fan that emigrated in the 1980s that still gets up at 2am to see matches live on TV? Or the fan that simply can’t afford to go to games anymore, such is the increasing cost of attending matches? Or a fan that moves to a town and starts supporting the local club? Or the fan that moves there and retains an affinity with where they used to live?
The answer, easily enough, is that all of them are potentially fans. There’s a piece of information we don’t know but we can reasonably infer – they all feel it. They feel elation upon victory, dejection after defeat, and depression and shame follow on from relegation. And here’s the problem in a nutshell: signifiers of the real measure – affection and feeling – are elevated to the thing in themselves. Going to games ceases to be a demonstration but an end in itself. Football fandom, slowly, inexorably, becomes a big-dick contest. And as with all big-dick contests, only of limited interest to the non dick wavers.