Who are the real fans?

I support Sunderlandnil, and I always have done since my granddad and mother told me what it meant when I was still at infants’ school. At the moment they play in the Premier League, but in my lifetime the team that once held the record of consecutive top-flight seasons dropped as low as the third level. Hardly the same as trying to support the ‘Dale, for example, but nevertheless it is considered “supporting a real club” when your weekly dose of football is at best disappointing and occasionally rather distressing.

Does that make me a real supporter? I could claim to be, because I still support my home- town club and have easily resisted the lure of the silverware the big clubs win year after year. I understand the suffering and disappointment and the humiliation of breaking negative records.

Of course, season ticket holders have a claim as being the true ‘real supporters’, because whether they stayed in their home town or not they make the effort to go to every game, although inevitably, those who go to every game, home and away, will also claim to be the genuine article. Then those fans who do that and volunteer in the club shop will step up, and so on.

I work in Dublin, and in my workplace (which is predominantly female and non-football supporting) there are two Liverpool supporters, one Manchester United supporter, a Chelsea fan (admittedly from years back) and even a Spurs fan. However, I am the only English man in the company, and there is also one Scot. The Scot, from Glasgow, is an ardent Celtic fan (“I’m not prejudiced at all, I don’t care who beats Rangers”) and I support my home-town club too. What excuse do the Irish have? They debate the minutiae of the weekend’s matches as if it really had anything to do with them, as if they had any right at all to call themselves supporters of a club in a city that they may never even have visited. Sure, they go on about the number of Irish players who have gone to England – but many more Scottish players have done the same and you won’t find a Scot blindly following an English club solely on that basis.

We have all met supporters of the big four who come from small towns and claim their small town teams as their second club – but they are not real supporters. Real supporters will always support the team from their home town first (or their dad’s home town if they are exiles) through thick and thin and never run off to jump on any big team’s bandwagon. Real supporters are not moneyed people from the capital who run off to Old Trafford or Anfield every other Saturday while their local teams, clubs like Leyton Orient or Brentford suffer as a consequence of the exodus towards success and the desire for reflected glory

One of my colleagues is from Waterford. He is an avid GAA fan, but he also supports Waterford United. That is a real fan. Anyone who decides to support the team from further up the road – or a totally different country – simply because they have recently been more successful, anyone who chases the silverware bandwagon and gives away their money to foreign clubs while their own towns starve is just a plastic fan.

Why do we hate teams?

I am a life-long supporter of Sunderlandnil, and yet again this season the club is providing more stress than enjoyment. However, apart from watching my own team teeter on the brink, I am also watching the battle for the title. And who isn’t? That’s the whole point of having a championship, surely, someone winning it? And like most fans I have my preferences, and I will spend a Saturday hoping that one team wins and another loses, for at the end of the day, “hating” one or more clubs is as much a part of any fan’s life as supporting their own.

As any fan knows, there is only room for one club. Yes, we all have other clubs that we follow for whatever reason – we once had a mate from there, or we went to uni there – but you can only support one club and you will never switch allegiance. However, when it comes to wanting another team to lose, the possibilities are endless.

First up, I have to say that I have nothing against Newcastle United. I am proud to be from the north-east and I have extolled the virtues of the region to the inhabitants of every place I’ve ever lived in, such virtues as Hadrian’s Wall, Holy Island, Durham Cathedral and Newcastle’s nightlife. Newcastle is a thriving, exciting city and its people are generous and welcoming, and I would hate to see the club go down for the terrible effect it would have on them.

There are teams that I strongly dislike and would love to see relegated year after year, including Mansfield (the miners’ strike), Fulham (their chairman) and Rangers (their sectarianism). And at the top of the Premier League, I am desperately hoping Liverpool fail to win the title.

This club is a recent (and perhaps temporary) addition to the list due to the direction the club has taken in recent years. Torres never did anything in Spain but fall over in the box, so it’s annoying to see he has finally decided to justify his wage, Xabi Alonso and Pepe Reina come from other sectarian clubs but my gripe rests mainly with former Valencia boss Rafa Benítez, whose only tactic of attempting to wind up opposition managers with cheap, incomprehensible shots meant that he achieved a feat that no other man ever has, that of making all the neutrals hope that Real Madrid would take the title ahead of Valencia.

These are my personal reasons for hoping a club loses a match or a title, and every other fan has their own, from local rivalry to an ex-girlfriend. However, there must be a deeper, more underlying reason for loving one team but hating many more. Why do we hate teams?

Well, as you only support one club that focus would be limited to 90 minutes a week, so what do we focus on when others are playing? Hating another team and hoping they lose can be extended to as many teams as possible because there’s no limit to hating teams, only to supporting them.

Hating teams is also closer to the true (and very limited) range of emotions available to the typical wannabe alpha-male, testosterone-charged males who tend to follow football. It’s cool to show aggression and even hatred in front of your peers, so the perfect vehicle is to hate another team. Expressing emotions is difficult for many men but these are emotions they are allowed to express in public.

It also aids in helping a person to demonstrate their loyalty to a group in order to belong. It is a useful tag so people can pigeon-hole us, and in turn we can express things we feel comfortable with in public. The aggression involved is a useful defence mechanism for men unsure of their standing in society and on a more localised level are unsure of the person they have in front of them, particularly if they fear that person may be intellectually superior (in other words they are worried about their own intellectual failings) in which case they will try and move the situation onto a plane they are more comfortable with, i.e. violence or hatred (and football).

Of course you have to support a team in the first place to be allowed to hate others, otherwise it’s not fair. There is nothing more frustrating than meeting a person who hates your club then claims not to support any club at all. There is no answer to their cowardice and the short conversation leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth.

So the season is coming to its inevitable close – the top four still are, and my team is living dangerously. And short of Sunderlandnil ever winning a title, the best I can hope for is that Benítez loses one.

Shearer: a canny lad

Okay, so we’re all clear with the fact that it wasn’t an April Fool’s Joke; Alan Shearer will lead his beloved Newcastle into the relegation fray. Respect to the man – the statistics show that he was one of English football’s greats, with nearly 350 senior club goals in well over 500 games and one goal every two games for England. More importantly, he seems like a genuinely nice bloke (although unfortunately I haven’t met him) in a time when that particular breed seems to be dying out.

On top of his remarkable playing career, his first managerial job is to see him thrown in at the deep end trying to save a huge club from relegation from the top flight, with all the disastrous consequences that that entails. I hope his decision to finally step up to the plate pleases the diehard Toon fans. It is certainly a decision which has overshadowed Roy Keane’s appointment at Sunderland.

To my mind it is a very intelligent decision, one which shows another facet of an already highly respected man, in that it is a very safe one. First of all, he has decided to become manager at a time when expectations have changed dramatically. Gone are the high – but not necessarily unrealistic – ones of the start of the season, which in the case of a club the size of Newcastle centred on a place in Europe, to be replaced with one single, clearly-focused expectation: stay up.

This being the situation, it is certainly difficult for things to get any worse for the club and its new manager. If Newcastle were to go down both he and especially the fans can blame the relegation on a number of reasons, none of which have anything to do with Shearer. If he saves Newcastle – and I sincerely hope he does, because let’s face it, they really are ‘too good’ to go down – he will be God. (They are too good, perhaps not as a team but definitely as a club, so please forgive the cliché.)

The smelly end of the stick is not taking over a relegation-threatened club, and Shearer is obviously too intelligent to fall for the alternative: taking over a mid-table club and not managing to move them anywhere after months of mind-numbingly boring football. At a club with expectations as high as Newcastle’s, not even Shearer would recover from the slating that effort would receive.

Good luck to him and the club – Sunderland have traditionally been in the top flight, but United really are a Premier League club.