Football, I think, is great for what it provides the viewer: the artistry of legs, televised, performing great tricks my hands can’t do and in a surrounding not much different from the Coliseum and often no less bloodthirsty. It is, I think, also great for what it takes away from the viewer: a troubled existence.
Supporting Arsenal, if it doesn’t lead you first to needing life support, is particularly effective for this latter art. Troubled thoughts about your life, career, kids, are substituted by the woe on television, by the dearth of goals, by the failure of football to present that televised artistry implicit in the agreement you signed with the sport.
So a football match becomes a 90-minute spree free of personal struggle. Feelings of inadequacy by an accountant with irreconcilable accounts are replaced by the torture of watching another ineffectual Olivier Giroud run. Tracking a medication error eludes the pharmacist, but for an hour and half, the plight of a so-called top flight team supersedes his confusion. The waywardness of a through pass overwhelms a welder’s woe. For the novelist, worry over the team’s lack of defensive integrity may, for the period, come to replace the anguish of lifeless characters. Football is distraction. Supporting an unpredictably bad team is the new religion; and that religion is the opium of the new people.
Many fans of course are oblivious to these subconscious workings of football’s magic. They believe beauty is what they are after when they pay thirty, fifty, hundred bucks or buy a brew they do not want, a drink they do not need for access to a pub’s screen—although one has to admit that alcohol of a certain strain and strength has utility in these matters as well. Mostly, it isn’t beauty the football fan has paid for; he has instead paid for an excuse to personally inexcusable circumstances. The fee is for freedom to worry about a number of athletic men and their failings.
No one learns anything from success. And a team’s success can overthrow a fan’s own joy. I can imagine, in ’99, a Manchester United fan perhaps acquiring a PhD, a car or a rich husband and then finding that by the end of the same season, his team, her team has won all of the major tournaments.
You will think her joy, his joy should quadruple; and you will be wrong. Joy is finite. And a component of joy has to reduce so the sum of all of a person’s capacity is unsurpassed. Besides, how much glee till apoplexy?
What I’d bet is that whatever personal accomplishment a Manchester United fan had in ’99 pales in comparison to the cups won by his team. He is likely to forget the year of his PhD but his club’s treble? Never.
How many teams does it take to reach Peak Happiness? 1, I belive. Yet the team was winning every trophy it could.
By contrast, this year, with The Club Formerly Known As Champions of England floundering and desperate to find teams to which it can lose, the acquisition of a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a pot, a pan, a pillowcase may seem pretty remarkable at season end.
Mind you, watching Arsenal, the club I am partial to, is only slightly different. You think, “Surely, I cannot be that bad”. Actually, you may be worse, but for those 90minutes, you are not on trial. Some avatar of failure has been placed on television to be reviled and insulted. Your own inadequacy is deferred while Giroud’s is urgent, imminent. And as his shots are as weak as most of your arguments, you will not forgive him. This is football as respite.
For those 90 minutes, a fan’s misery is narrowed, consisting of just how Oxlade-Chamberlain would get another run at the Bavarian defence; how that ball may find a route into Chelsea’s net; how Manchester United could help Arsenal with an own goal; how Suarez and Sturridge should contemplate suicide to stop Liverpool’s onslaught.
Football is the opium of the fan. And it offers an advantage religion cannot: Barring someone dying for you, in religion, perhaps in life, you will be punished for your sins, for your choosing of the venal over the virtuous; but at the end of every football match, you are absolved. Your sins are limited to hurling abuse at the screen and at the end, those sins are washed away in time for next weekend’s round of matches.
And the thought never escapes a football fan that whatever has happened may possibly have happened anyway. On occasion, I have deluded myself into believing that if I cheered Arsenal louder, arrive in front of the television on time, then my efforts would translate into glory for the club. But this conscious delusion is more superstition than super-fandom. It is punctuality as amulet, cheering as rabbit foot. Beneath everything, every fan knows that an emotional investment is not the same thing as financial or physical investment. You shouldn’t care, but you do. And neither your care nor your juju is enough.
Real life is different. And even if you are convinced that nothing in your life will change if you do nothing, there is always someone, the parent, the girlfriend, the boss, the wife, the straightforward friend, who earnestly believes your action or inaction is to blame.
With football you can blame someone else; you may hurl abuses at a coach used to hurling water bottles.
And if Arsenal loses, it is the team and coach and club owner’s fault, and maybe even the janitor’s fault; not yours. You may be depressed as is possible if you receive a sack or a divorce. Yet, depression as experienced by football fans, is brought by other people’s mediocrity, or in some cases other people’s superiority—for the uber-frustrating Arsenal players, their own mediocrity and the superiority of the opponent manage to show up at the same time and ever so frequent as to provoke alarm. But that gives Arsenal fans a rare chance to experience the transcendence of failure very often.
A team like Arsenal, accustomed to loss of all kinds—near-wins, unexpected draws, dismissive defeats and outright crushing—and with sporadic flashes of televised artistry, gives the fan more distraction for every loss of points; and more joy for every win. It is win-win and ought to be good for the heart, a cheap regimen for these obsessed-with-success times: It is 90 minutes of deflective therapy at the minimal cost of television concentration and, perhaps, a bottle of beer.
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