Damocles said:
Sorry, I wanted a bit of back and forth to try and make the point, Ill try and make it without audience participation. These are my main points:
All initial football emotion is manufactured. The timing of cheering, the songs and the booing is all a social norm that is inherited by attendence. Supporting a football club as a child often comes from peer pressure, desire to commit to parental tradition and is initially hollow. I have never met a 8 year old who genuinely loves the club, yet I've met plenty who profess to. People cheers goals at this stage because they believe they should, not as an outburst of emotion. This is the manufactured emotion I alluded to.
To quote Doc Brown, you aren't thinking four dimensionally, Marty. People were only originally considered proper fans who attended because as you know, games were not televised thus performance couldn't be judged at all. This then warped into only local fans who attend are proper fans, which completely ignores the rise of globalism, TV and more recently social media.
Lastly, sport is competitive. People enjoy this aspect of football thus want to root for a team. Due to fanaticism and tribalism, added to things like Bluemoon, these fans do become just as part of a social group as those living next door to the ground. They communicate with City fans all day, which surely is your argument for community based emotion? The rooting for a social institution?
You have trouble empathising because you already have your social group formed and you cannot see places like forums and small networked communities as being an adequate replacement.
I don't want to get into what defines 'loving' a club. It's a word, often overly used, that I could make a very good argument for being totally misplaced when referring to a sporting institution. Does anyone actually ever 'love' a football club? Depends what you mean. I'd prefer to see it in terms of feeling connected.
And the reason that people feel truly connected to a sports club is that it impacts on their daily interactions with people. Their relationships involve discussion of and a history of involvement with these institutions. It isn't the fact that they say they 'love' a club or that they type stuff on the internet about them or take the trouble to flick a switch on a tv every so often that makes this connection between an individual and a club. It is the fact that their friends, their family, their society is linked to this club/sport. That their real life features this sport and club as a constantly occurring reference point. That the people they know and the people they care for share a sense of feeling (good, or in the case of reds, bad - or even indifferent but knowing what it's about) for something that they all know.
It isn't buying a shirt or just saying so that makes something important to someone. It is experiences and, more importantly, shared experiences. Being exposed to something and being able to. That is central to the human condition. Whether it be sport or other interests. I'll caveat that there are many issues around the world that I consider to be important and they don't necessarily come from sharing the experience of, say, someone living under apartheid or something equally bad. That comes from empathy. Then again, I don't think anyone is crass enough to be able to equate such a circumstance with trying to make out you 'love' a football club.
So, you might have the seed of a point when you start to argue that a forum and media exposure are a replacement for genuine shared experiences and therefore the genuine impact and social manipulation that football in Manchester has can easily be matched anywhere around the world by logging on to here. I would strongly argue otherwise. Humans are social animals. We develop real relationships with people we see, interact with, live with and share experiences with. Typing 'I love City' and switching on a tv barely register as shared experiences. They are the equivalent of totally meaningless actions we do every day.
Let me ask this. At the ground on Monday can anyone really say that they felt that it was just an excellent footballing victory which brought the chance of a prize with it that they were celebrating. Certainly for almost every blue that I know it was something different. It was the culmination of decades of being looked down upon (not in real terms but in Manchester football terms) ending. A shift in how football will be discussed in Manchester for years. A reference point that will genuinely have (even though it isn't a genuinely important issue) millions of individual impacts on the way people in Manchester interact and converse with people when discussing football (and even when not, it could be argued) for the following days, weeks, months and years. Was that football match and what the result hopefully meant JUST a 1-0 victory over the current champions? Or did you find yourself thinking back to people you know, places you've been, discussions you've had and, as X Factor as it sounds, the journey of this club and your fellow supporters over the last 30 years?
And if the answer is yes, which I don't see how it couldn't be, then now think as to how on Earth that can be replicated by a 'sense of community' or a 'sense of feeling' that is at initially, maybe totally, fostered by typing and then pressing 'post' and turning on a tv. Whilst the rest of your community and real life relationships would struggle to differentiate between Manchester United and Manchester City.
It is the human decision to make the actual choice "I want to become part of that success" (whether that success is being Champions of Europe when you start claiming it or just being a team that is more glamorous or in a higher division than your local one) and then going out of your way to convince yourself and others that you are that interests me.
Why people would feel that? What motivates them? It isn't a love of the game as that is not specific to a single (almost exclusively) relatively successful club. And it isn't tribalism as the tribalism aspect in football is, despite internet United fans/boasters everywhere trying to convince you otherwise, defined by the locality and the impact it has on most relationships in your social and family circle. That's tribalism. Not arguing with a so-called United fan on the internet that 'your' far away club has just scored one more goal than 'his' then both logging off and returning to a world where Manchester United and Manchester City mean virtually nothing to most.
It's not tribalism, in my view. It is a desire to be able to boast. A desire for one-up-manship. And that, from my point of view, is not a very desirable characteristic. Especially when the tools that you are using for such boastfulness are not a matter of circumstance but a matter of choice. And when those tools have very little personal connection to your actual circumstances.
The next bit will probably sound quite out of place and dramatic. But I don't have time for certain characteristics. Boastfulness is one of them. As is desire to claim some sort of reflective glory from the achievements of others. I can stomach it in football because a) it is an unimportant issue in the scheme of things and doesn't (even though it feels like it does) genuinely affect the well being of families (removing the arguments about area investment, etc) and b) knock-about, less than totally serious competitiveness is a part of friendship and strong relationships. But most importantly, I don't see supporting a club that is part of the fabric of your relationships as being boasting or claiming glory. It is, in my view, about supporting them - a much different concept to trying to boast about their victories - and taking an interest in the aspect of your chosen sport that is rooted in your society and social circles. That has more of an impact on your society and your relationships than you being able to just say an isolated "Hey, my team won".
Anyway, got work to do. That has been typed really quickly and without checking. It probably doesn't get across what I am trying to.
