I never claimed to be their biggest fan, but don't EVER call me plastic. I have my reasons for picking the teams I've picked. I didn't just pluck them out of thin air. Don't think I go walking around pretending to be a bigger fan of Fulham than anyone who grew up in Southwest London. I'm not that delusional. If you think I haven't experienced true "terrace culture" then you have never heard of the 700 Level in Philadelphia. Sure, it's the other kind of football... but it was an amazing collection of passionate fans gathered together to root on their team. Don't think I've ever experienced your terrace culture... but all the things I've heard about it lead me to believe the two are very similar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/700_Level
Arf ... I think you're misreading the signs a bit here. As to whether or not you're a plastic, your previous comments about your supposed "Oirishness" rather undermine your subsequent claims about the fervent reality of your support for the three clubs you "support". You were fighting an uphill battle from day one, really.
I have heard that Philly fans are just NUTS! I met a few of them and they will rip their heroes a new one just as fast as they will love them to death. Probably the only place in the US where you find that, Chicago fans we are just too nice and loyal....constant sellouts and many years of underachievement. The Bulls are the only true long lasting sports glory to hang our hat on...they haven't won an NBA title in almost 10 years and they still sell out the UC!!!
Americans are sensitive to their ancestry. Why is that so hard to understand? We are a nation of immigrants and my ancestors happen to be mostly from Ireland, with a few from Wales. My Great-Grandparents were Catholic and treated very poorly in Belfast, part of the reason they moved here. It is not "supposed" Irishness. Technically, I may obtain duel citizenship, and I just may very soon. Then what?
I know. Terribly naff and an endless source of amusement to the rest of humanity. Right. Like I said - you're a Yank.
To be honest, i dont mind Americans supporting teams. It's just that it looks as if most support either: 1. Liverpool, Man United and Arsenal. To me, thats just glory hunting and very boring. 2. Teams from good old London, Fulham, Tottenham and West Ham. America, you do know that there is more to England than "Landan". If i wanted to support a team who weren't local to me, i would support the team with the best. Supporters and Anthem Kit Ground. Keep Right On
A lot of Americans don't do their research on the league and it's just easy to pick the biggest names. It's very boring and annoying. I'm a historian of your league. I respect your league. I only hope our league can maybe become half as good as yours. That's all I'm trying to say.
Two points I would like to make here. 1. I dont just support City in the hope that they would someday win something. We're shit, and I accept that, but something that supporters of the big four rarely seem to realise is that winning isn't everything. I go to football because City are my local team and I was bought up a blue. I have blue mates and going to the game is fun because of the laughs we have. Same thing at away games, nothing more fun than getting up early, having a few ales, a good singsong and seeing a new place (or in my case re-visiting one) where you can have banter with the home fans. I have built up a core of around 200/300 people who I always see at aways. Dont know thier names, but always see them in the pubs and we nod to each other when we clock each other. That spirit and camaderie and feeling of belonging to an extended family is the reason I go to football. Its not about winning for me, although that would be nice. I just have fun. 'Win or lose, on the booze' is my motto. It must be shit following a team just to say to rival fans 'Yeah, we've won something, woohoo', but can you relate to them? When I talk to fans who follow other teams we always talk about football, but less about the winning, but more about having a laugh, a joke, and wishing each other well for the upcoming game. We dont talk about how many titles we have, we talk about ordinary stuff, like how thier team is doing and vice versa. Both City and United have a huge away fanbase support we both know this, but like so many fans have said on the trains home when we're still singing and laughing and joking even when we've lost they have said to us 'You lot are real Manchester' and that makes me feel proud. I'd rather follow a team where the fans can have a laugh, a joke, and even if we lose they will be there the next game. When we got relegated to Division two years ago, I went to every away game and I can honestly say those were the best away days I've had. Seeing new grounds, new fans, and feeling nothing but pride at seeing 3000+ blues making the same journey. From having fans locked out of Northampton Town, to having 5,000+ at places like Tranmere, to taking three sides of a stadium like at Swindon Town. Those were great days, and I can honestly say, hand on heart, that if we were to sink to those depths again I would still be there week in week out. How many of you lot can say the same? I sometimes lurk on Red Issue, and the moaning that goes on there even when your lot have won just beggars disbelief. And onto point two. Celtic. I have Irish roots. My grandparents emigrated from Ireland to set up base in Manchester. They all support Celtic, along with the hundreds of relatives I have back home. A huge Irish Catholic family. I dont claim to be a massive Celtic fan, I definately am not, but they are a team whos results I look out for, and when they played down at Old Trafford the two times in 2006 I went. I found it surprisingly easy to get tickets, even though I'd never been to a Celtic away before. Just got one in the United ends. This just blows away the argument that your lot sometimes employ that it is impossible to get tickets. I managed to get mine without many problems at all by just going into Manchester the day of the game and asking around for tickets. Not that difficult, but then again I am from Manchester, not Ireland like you. Anything else you would like to remind me of, like how shit we are? Believe it or not, it doesnt bother me in the slightest. MCFC Wythenshawe Blues.
ditto for me about the away support bit, and perhaps to an even greater degree as when I did the bulk of my away days 200/300 people would be the total away following for half of the games. Quite a few of the fans I know from back then miss those days, with nostalgia drawing a veil over the football we endured more often than not. couldn't agree more. Armchair fans talk about matches and players, while fans who go a lot tend to talk about the act of being a fan, the experiences etc. It's all from a fan's perspective, rather than sounding like an audition for a pundit's spot on match of the day. too true. It's football, not top trumps.
I miss away-day trains. And I agree on the difference between fans of different vintages. The younger they are the more they talk about football as a sport, rather than a lifestyle.
When you're young everything is fresh and new. When you're older, you've seen great players get great and then get old and crap, you've seen your team enjoying the good times and the bad and maybe the good again. You know that if you lose this game, it's not the end of the world.
I'm not sure that's true. When I was a kid of course I thought of football as a glamorous sport, full of heroes and exciting things like that. But it was still all about the day out - getting breakfast from Mum, Dad taking us down to the ground, off into the Paddock with your little mates, s************ing at the swearing, coming home with the match programme and pouring over the details of the game and the team, collecting the match stubs. Sure, I idolised Dalglish and Rush and ... erm, Sammy Lee (actually, that was only me, I think) but saying "football" conjured up images in my mind then that it doesn't in today's kids. Colin expressed the substance of true fandom beautifully (although I disagree with the notion that only unsuccessful clubs can provide fans with such experiences), but the key point is that a lot of that substance, that experiential value, has gone out of football because it's too easy to 'consume the product' without ever coming close to the game. We shorthand the description of this problem by referring to "armchair fans" but in reality it's much more than that. Football as it is presented to the general public today is not actually about experience, its about consumption. But Sky and the rest of the media give us the means of consumption through a prism of "experience", shaped by hype and noise and a pretence at fervour and intensity. All those stupid sweep shots of the replica-shirt-clad crowds at Premiership stadia, shaking their fists and yelling "Come on!" at the camera before a game, or the adverts for a game showing a carefully assembled group of ethnically diverse, clean-cut middle class fans (including obligatory female fan) on their way to the ground ... it's all miles away from what being a football fan actually used to mean. But increasingly, the people who either still experience, or at least remember experiencing a non-packaged reality are being outnumbered by people for whom the "experience" of football is almost exclusively gained through this prism.
Colin does have a bit of inverse snobbery (I wonder whether thats endemic about Man City supporters ) Personally I think that SKY is only doing what every corporation is doing with merchanidising their product. Whether it's an advert for a new car or pubs being 'themed' the world is changing, and no amount of romantising the past will stop it. That's not to say I think that SKY is a good thing. You have to take a SKY 'Production' (and I use the word correctly) for what it is, and try to avoid the rubbish bits ("This is the biggest game since....since... the last biggest game", any sections with Richard Keys talking etc.etc.) and gain the benefits, in that they do give better coverage of the actual 90 minutes of individual games and obviously more games than the BBC or ITV ever did. When I was a kid, Liverpool had it's fair share of bandwagonners due purely down to their success, and whilst I'm sure that SKY etc.etc. have exacerbated that in the 90s and 00s for the successful teams, it's always happened in some degree since the media became involved with the sport. The people that SKY attracts and get their football purely thru SKY will always outnumber the people who go to games purely down to logistics, 60,000 at Arsenal vs a couple of million on the TV, that's impossible to change. Football is evolving, that's unstoppable, and in some ways it's improving (not getting your head kicked in) and in others it's not, but the whole match day 'experience' is still being had by as many people now as it did 30 years ago, (give or take the issue over capacities). Kids might not s************ over the swearing, and pore over programmes anymore, but kids don't s************ at swearing anywhere anymore, and they no longer collect comics as we did 30 years ago. If we go back to the original title of the thread, plastic fans only ruin the game if we let them. Yes, they outnumber 'real' fans, but I don't believe that there are less 'real' fans now than there used to be. As an aside, I have a Reading supporting mate, who has been a season ticket holder and away game go-er for many years who's gone the other way. He still enjoys the whole day out, but actually enjoys it more than the football itself. So he's thinking of giving up going to games and just going out for the day instead. Personally I just think it's because he only became a football fan for the pissups!
Yeah, but that's it, innit? How did football become a product owned by a corporation? Don't get me wrong, this isn't some misty-eyed reverie for an irrecoverable past. But the very fact that we can talk about Sky and "their product" in those terms rather proves my point. Yeah, all that is fine. For what it is, Sky is what it is, in effect. Which, as that sentence implies, means nothing. My point is precisely that - most people these days get their football through an entirely empty medium.
The whole reason I became an Arsenal supporter was not because or their record because at the time I didn't know a thing about football. The reason I started supporting Arsenal was because the girls who I was dating at the time father was a spurs supporter, and I hated that bastard and he hated me as well, so in order to piss him off that little bit more it was Arsenal all the way. But even then I'm still not much of a supporter since I moved back to the states.
Their product being the transmission of football through the medium of TV rather than the football itself. You're right in that the percentage of people who see football at Stadia has dropped because millions now watch it on the box, but the actual quantity of those people probably hasn't dropped. We're talking about extra viewers rather than a movement from one situation to another. For example I've watched countless games on SKY that I would never have seen live, but i would never gone to see those games (Manu vs Liverpool f'example). Football fans are alive and well, and can be found at every ground. I think we get a 'coloured' (probably red and blue) view on here to be honest, which is down to the culture of many new fans, some of which is good, some not so good, but, and I know this is the easy cop out, let's forget that it wasn't so long ago that you didn't wear your colours to a lot of games, and you were constantly on edge in case some ********er and his mates decided to have a go with you with a stanley. Was that a better culture ?
That's a distinction too refined for most of today's football folk. Certainly, you'd be met with blank stares at Sky TV Towers. Well, if you looked at long-term aggregates that took in all the peaks and troughs of several generations of support, then it probably has - and primarily because of the Taylor report, but that's beside the point. I'm not really making a point about people who watch via TV versus people who attend games in terms of exposure in numbers. My point is that this simple fact irrevocably alters the nature of what must therefore be termed the standard football experience. It was a more real culture. But again, you miss my point. I'm not making direct comparisons to "the olden days" and trying to label one "better" than the other. For a start, you can still get most of what you got back then today, as Colin, Richard and I have already said in this thread. What I am saying is that the vast majority of football fans no longer do, precisely because the means by which they acquire and maintain their affiliation to a football club has no physical realm. It's virtual fandom and, as such, necessarily devoid of the truly experiential parts of being a football fan that Colin so eloquently described.
There speaks a man who uses pie charts in his reports If that's his point, then fair enough, but he seemed to be picking out supporters of the 'big four' in that tone (that I may be imagining) that long suffering big team with no silverware supporters tend to use, rather than new supporters in general.
The more i read this thread the more i become confused on your positions. The football experience that you described is absolutely wonderful and i would have loved to experienced it but unfortunately is not availible in the states, not even in our major sports. Are you saying that if you can not not get that full experience of going to the stadium every match and going to away games, you might else well not enjoy the game on tv? There's no point in watching the game on tv, because its not as good as being there? That doesn't make sense to me. The yankees are my favorite baseball team for example, my home town team, and the only team ive loved since i knew what baseball is. But ive seen 10x the games on tv then i have in the stadium. I guess that doesnt make me a real fan. Ive gone to away yankee games and been to different ballparks. They have all been in the northeast though. If i go to see an away yanks game at Camden yards in Baltimore, its about the distance of london to manchester. Can i do that 13 times a year!? maybe but it would be hard on the wallet. And the wallet is where it comes to play. It costs me 18 dollars to get to, and in to a yankees game, a flight from new york to london, oh around 600. Would i love to be at emirates every saturday? Of course, but ive got a 20000 dollar school debt looming over my head, and can only rarely make such a pligramage. Doest mean i don't want the magic experience, its just impractical at the momment. Maybe ill just move to london and be done with it, because believe or not football is my passion and arsenal is the team i love, even more so than lyon which is really just my fathers team that i grew up to like by default.
basically, what you should do is turn off the computer, keep doing what you are doing and nevermind what some pompous idiots from the internet think of the degree of your support. problem solved.
No, not at all. People who support a club in another country can be every bit as sincere and fervent as someone who does it from a few yards down the road - and can enjoy their support as much. It's just different. The fact is that what used to be the common and unifying experience of nearly all football fans (the thing Richard, Colin and I describe) is, in this global era of the game, actually a minority perspective, a minority experience. Which, to those of us blessed with having it, is tragic. To people who never have experienced it, it's obviously less of an issue.