I’m British but I grew up mostly abroad, so when I went to university in England I discovered a new species of man: the Total Fan, the teenager whose main identity was the football club he supported. I witnessed conversations in the common room that went like this: Student in plastic Manchester United shirt: “We’re brilliant this season.” Student in Spurs shirt: “No, you’re shit.” Student in Crystal Palace shirt: “He’s right, Steve. You’re shit.” They weren’t exactly casting aspersions on Steve’s personality. They were talking about his football club. However, they saw the two things as essentially the same. Steve was Manchester United. The Spurs fan once told me that, when his team won the FA Cup, he walked into the common room to receive everybody’s congratulations as if he personally had lifted the trophy.
Later in Britain, I saw people get addressed by the name of the club they supported: “Oi, Chelsea.” Fandom as identity was new to me. In the Netherlands, where I’d fallen for the sport, football lovers would ask each other, “Who do you play for?”, meaning which local amateur team. In Britain, I met devoted fans who had scarcely ever kicked a ball in their lives. The Premier League’s return from its three-month hiatus feels incomplete without fans. English supporters traditionally regard themselves as participants rather than spectators. It felt wrong on Wednesday to be watching Manchester City against Arsenal in an empty stadium. “Fan cams” behind the goals could show up to 16 supporters watching from home but, fittingly, City at one point managed to fill only 13 slots, leaving three empty screens. The 150-year-old British custom of fandom is temporarily broken, and both the game and the fans are the poorer for it. For many people, fandom is more than a leisure-time pursuit: it’s a primary source of identity Fandom is often dismissed as a leisure-time pursuit, opium of the masses or stupid distraction. However, for many people, it’s more than that: a primary source of identity, or a crutch to get through life. And the English variety of fandom is so powerful that it has spread around the globe. How did football become so important?
Today, atomisation is again common across Europe. Ever fewer people live in their town of birth, belong to a church or trade union, or spend their career in a single workplace. Living alone has become common. Many people form their primary attachment to a football club, or at least to fellow fans of that club. (Clubs themselves have historically treated supporters with contempt, though recently they have grown interested in them as consumers.) Fandom helps people say who they are. That’s what my friends at university were doing: if you’re a teenage boy with low self-esteem, it’s much better to become known as “Tottenham”, to align yourself with the alpha males who play for the team. Fandom remains a favourite source of masculine identity: witness the avowedly male “Democratic Football Lads Alliance”, including many hooligans, who violently “defended” a Winston Churchill statue in London last weekend. Fandom also gives fans a ready-made topic of conversation. Nick Hornby writes in his classic fan’s memoir Fever Pitch: “The first and easiest friends I made at college were football fans; a studious examination of a newspaper back page during the lunch hour of the first day in a new job usually provokes some kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have: they become repressed, they fail in their relationships with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to express their emotional needs, they cannot relate to their children, and they die lonely and miserable. But, you know, what the hell?”
Life is hard enough as it is. Fandom offers so many psychological compensations — nowadays, thankfully, to women, too. People age, divorce, move away and die, but if you’re lucky, the one thing in life that doesn’t change is your club, still playing in the same colours and possibly even the same ground as when you were eight. All that’s required to be a fan among fans is to know what to grumble about. On match day, you become an eight-year-old without responsibilities again: it’s the players and manager who have to perform. And watching the game, in the stadium or a pub, is a ritual you can share with people you love without needing to speak. Arsenal gave Hornby and his divorced father a way to be together: “We could talk when we wanted, the football gave us something to talk about.” The fantasy world of football can momentarily erase even quite pressing personal problems. As a soldier on a German military ship in Italy during the second world war, the great footballer Fritz Walter found himself mobbed by sailors. He reflected later: “For them I am the embodiment of concepts that seem to be lost for ever: peace, home, sport . . . ” He was probably too modest to say it, but he also embodied beauty and greatness. Few of us get much of either in our daily lives, but watch Lionel Messi on telly, and there they are.
The Premier League’s restart is being watched worldwide. English football has seduced foreign fans for decades with the killer combination of tradition (ancient clubs), youth culture (those haircuts) and community (singing fans). The great Dutchman Johan Cruyff, born in 1947, told me in 2000: “English football, in the time I was growing up, was three houses above everything else . . . They were already pros when we didn’t even know the ball was round, in a manner of speaking.” .... In communist Albania, fans would listen under the bedclothes to football broadcasts on the forbidden BBC. The spell was strongest in Britain’s former colonies. The English language, and the communications networks of empire — boys’ cartoons such as Billy’s Boots and Roy of the Rovers as well as the BBC — carried English football even to poor non-white townships outside Cape Town. Mike Abrahams, a former Cape gangster turned activist, told me one of his friends named his son Shankly, after Liverpool’s legendary manager Bill Shankly. “And this is an activist!” Abrahams exclaimed. “You can say that England is a bitch on Friday night, and then on Saturday afternoon you go to a sports pub to watch English soccer.” A friend of mine who has studied the deep sociological divide that runs through Thai society — Liverpool fans versus Manchester United fans — points to the desire of people in a developing country to attach themselves to something “world-class”. You may live in a Bangkok shack, and your children attend a bad school, and you will never rise above these circumstances, but you are Liverpool. In James Erskine’s documentary series This Is Football, a group of Liverpool fans, the Rwandan Reds, meet in Kigali to watch every game together. Many were orphaned in the genocide of 1994. They don’t have families but they have Liverpool. Liverpool FC’s original supporters in the 1890s, searching for their moorings in a city where life expectancy was 38, would have understood.
An absolutely splendid read about football fandom and why football matters to all of us and why, in spite of so many differences of opinion and debates, we come keep coming back to this forum...just shows how football has remained relevant to our lives in spite of man-made and natural disasters
Just posted excerpts...do read the entire article!!
The advent of the Covid-19 crisis has brought unprecedented challenges to all areas of social, cultural, and economic life. As one of the most popular cultural practices, sport has been particularly impacted with the cancellation since mid-March of most sporting events in countries across the world. Sport has nonetheless continued to occupy an important place in people’s lives and in the contemporary media landscape. This webinar brings together a range of speakers engaging with sport from a variety of perspectives, including sports history, sports governance and policy, sports practitioners and representative organisations, sport and the media, and gender and sport, to consider the impact of the pandemic on sport in Ireland and internationally.
Participants
Professor Paul Rouse, UCD, one of the leading experts on the history of Irish sport
Dr Mary O’Connor, CEO of the Federation of Irish Sport, and All-Ireland winning player and All-Star with Cork in camogie and Gaelic football
Dr Niamh Kitching, Mary Immaculate College, whose work focuses on gender equality and sport, including female athletes and coaches
Dr Marcus Free, Mary Immaculate College, who specialises on media and sport
Dr Borja García, Loughborough University, an authority on sports policy and governance and member of the European Commission’s expert group on sport policy
This webinar is part of a series developed through the Moore Institute’s COVID-19 Response Group. Video and audio recordings of the previous sessions are available on the group’s webpage.
The news inside China as told by a Chinese colleague of mine is pretty interesting . Chinese Govt. have been trying to suppress the news about Galwan clash. Their Twitter like site weibo is filled with discussions about India and Galwan clash. There were rumours going on about their casualties and the lack of recognition of it. The Chinese are not used to their soldiers dying in action and the damage our side has caused them was more serious than we thought. Atleast 20-30 deaths was confirmed by a weibo group of semi liberals before it was removed by the Chinese authorities. Donno if it may sound vile or distasteful but it somehow has given me a sense of relief .
Comments
Simon Kuper on why football matters
I’m British but I grew up mostly abroad, so when I went to university in England I discovered a new species of man: the Total Fan, the teenager whose main identity was the football club he supported. I witnessed conversations in the common room that went like this: Student in plastic Manchester United shirt: “We’re brilliant this season.” Student in Spurs shirt: “No, you’re shit.” Student in Crystal Palace shirt: “He’s right, Steve. You’re shit.” They weren’t exactly casting aspersions on Steve’s personality. They were talking about his football club. However, they saw the two things as essentially the same. Steve was Manchester United. The Spurs fan once told me that, when his team won the FA Cup, he walked into the common room to receive everybody’s congratulations as if he personally had lifted the trophy.Later in Britain, I saw people get addressed by the name of the club they supported: “Oi, Chelsea.” Fandom as identity was new to me. In the Netherlands, where I’d fallen for the sport, football lovers would ask each other, “Who do you play for?”, meaning which local amateur team. In Britain, I met devoted fans who had scarcely ever kicked a ball in their lives. The Premier League’s return from its three-month hiatus feels incomplete without fans. English supporters traditionally regard themselves as participants rather than spectators. It felt wrong on Wednesday to be watching Manchester City against Arsenal in an empty stadium. “Fan cams” behind the goals could show up to 16 supporters watching from home but, fittingly, City at one point managed to fill only 13 slots, leaving three empty screens. The 150-year-old British custom of fandom is temporarily broken, and both the game and the fans are the poorer for it. For many people, fandom is more than a leisure-time pursuit: it’s a primary source of identity Fandom is often dismissed as a leisure-time pursuit, opium of the masses or stupid distraction. However, for many people, it’s more than that: a primary source of identity, or a crutch to get through life. And the English variety of fandom is so powerful that it has spread around the globe. How did football become so important?
Today, atomisation is again common across Europe. Ever fewer people live in their town of birth, belong to a church or trade union, or spend their career in a single workplace. Living alone has become common. Many people form their primary attachment to a football club, or at least to fellow fans of that club. (Clubs themselves have historically treated supporters with contempt, though recently they have grown interested in them as consumers.) Fandom helps people say who they are. That’s what my friends at university were doing: if you’re a teenage boy with low self-esteem, it’s much better to become known as “Tottenham”, to align yourself with the alpha males who play for the team. Fandom remains a favourite source of masculine identity: witness the avowedly male “Democratic Football Lads Alliance”, including many hooligans, who violently “defended” a Winston Churchill statue in London last weekend. Fandom also gives fans a ready-made topic of conversation. Nick Hornby writes in his classic fan’s memoir Fever Pitch: “The first and easiest friends I made at college were football fans; a studious examination of a newspaper back page during the lunch hour of the first day in a new job usually provokes some kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have: they become repressed, they fail in their relationships with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to express their emotional needs, they cannot relate to their children, and they die lonely and miserable. But, you know, what the hell?”
Life is hard enough as it is. Fandom offers so many psychological compensations — nowadays, thankfully, to women, too. People age, divorce, move away and die, but if you’re lucky, the one thing in life that doesn’t change is your club, still playing in the same colours and possibly even the same ground as when you were eight. All that’s required to be a fan among fans is to know what to grumble about. On match day, you become an eight-year-old without responsibilities again: it’s the players and manager who have to perform. And watching the game, in the stadium or a pub, is a ritual you can share with people you love without needing to speak. Arsenal gave Hornby and his divorced father a way to be together: “We could talk when we wanted, the football gave us something to talk about.” The fantasy world of football can momentarily erase even quite pressing personal problems. As a soldier on a German military ship in Italy during the second world war, the great footballer Fritz Walter found himself mobbed by sailors. He reflected later: “For them I am the embodiment of concepts that seem to be lost for ever: peace, home, sport . . . ” He was probably too modest to say it, but he also embodied beauty and greatness. Few of us get much of either in our daily lives, but watch Lionel Messi on telly, and there they are.
The Premier League’s restart is being watched worldwide. English football has seduced foreign fans for decades with the killer combination of tradition (ancient clubs), youth culture (those haircuts) and community (singing fans). The great Dutchman Johan Cruyff, born in 1947, told me in 2000: “English football, in the time I was growing up, was three houses above everything else . . . They were already pros when we didn’t even know the ball was round, in a manner of speaking.” .... In communist Albania, fans would listen under the bedclothes to football broadcasts on the forbidden BBC. The spell was strongest in Britain’s former colonies. The English language, and the communications networks of empire — boys’ cartoons such as Billy’s Boots and Roy of the Rovers as well as the BBC — carried English football even to poor non-white townships outside Cape Town. Mike Abrahams, a former Cape gangster turned activist, told me one of his friends named his son Shankly, after Liverpool’s legendary manager Bill Shankly. “And this is an activist!” Abrahams exclaimed. “You can say that England is a bitch on Friday night, and then on Saturday afternoon you go to a sports pub to watch English soccer.” A friend of mine who has studied the deep sociological divide that runs through Thai society — Liverpool fans versus Manchester United fans — points to the desire of people in a developing country to attach themselves to something “world-class”. You may live in a Bangkok shack, and your children attend a bad school, and you will never rise above these circumstances, but you are Liverpool. In James Erskine’s documentary series This Is Football, a group of Liverpool fans, the Rwandan Reds, meet in Kigali to watch every game together. Many were orphaned in the genocide of 1994. They don’t have families but they have Liverpool. Liverpool FC’s original supporters in the 1890s, searching for their moorings in a city where life expectancy was 38, would have understood.
https://www.ft.com/content/6ce267ea-b0ad-11ea-a4b6-31f1eedf762e
An absolutely splendid read about football fandom and why football matters to all of us and why, in spite of so many differences of opinion and debates, we come keep coming back to this forum...just shows how football has remained relevant to our lives in spite of man-made and natural disasters
Just posted excerpts...do read the entire article!!
Sport and Covid-19
June 25 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Details
Venue
Organizer
The advent of the Covid-19 crisis has brought unprecedented challenges to all areas of social, cultural, and economic life. As one of the most popular cultural practices, sport has been particularly impacted with the cancellation since mid-March of most sporting events in countries across the world. Sport has nonetheless continued to occupy an important place in people’s lives and in the contemporary media landscape. This webinar brings together a range of speakers engaging with sport from a variety of perspectives, including sports history, sports governance and policy, sports practitioners and representative organisations, sport and the media, and gender and sport, to consider the impact of the pandemic on sport in Ireland and internationally.
Participants
The webinar will be chaired by Dr Seán Crosson of the Huston School of Film and Digital Media at NUI Galway, and leader of the Sport and Exercise Research Group in the Moore Institute.
Registration
You can register to join via Zoom at: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_V16dtmjsRZqClBp51kVmzQ. The session will also be broadcast live on our Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/mooreinstitute/live.
About the series
This webinar is part of a series developed through the Moore Institute’s COVID-19 Response Group. Video and audio recordings of the previous sessions are available on the group’s webpage.
https://mooreinstitute.ie/event/sport-and-covid-19/
Anybody interested in joining the seminar can register through the links mentioned above