It was a few moments before the whistle blew on the opening match of the 2006 World Cup when a text message arrived from a colleague. ‘Well, here we go!’ it read. I rolled my eyes, slipped my phone back into my pocket, and left the message unanswered.
Why the grumpiness? Because the message came from a man who normally took no interest whatsoever in the game, except to occasionally mock people like me for being daft enough to enjoy a ‘silly game with silly men kicking a ball around’. Yet here he was, transformed by the arrival of the World Cup into an enthusiastic student of… ‘footie’.
He wasn’t alone. Another football-sceptic colleague became inordinately invested in the office World Cup sweepstake, while a third underwent an overnight conversion from someone who barely knew football existed into someone wandering around the office whistling that bloody Baddiel and Skinner song. I’m not going to lie, I resented all three of them enormously.
Football supporters can be strangely possessive about the game. Perhaps it’s inevitable. We spend years accumulating knowledge, building rituals, establishing loyalties and proving, mostly to ourselves, that we belong. We endure long stretches of boredom, disappointment and frustration for occasional moments of joy. We learn to ignore the bafflement and contempt of people who simply don’t understand why any of it matters.
And somewhere along the way, we start drawing distinctions between the people who genuinely love football, and the people who seem interested only when football becomes fashionable. Every fan eventually develops an instinctive suspicion of two familiar figures: the glory-hunter and the recent convert.
The World Cup is a magnet for both. Every four years, social media and pubs fill with people who haven’t watched a match since the previous tournament but suddenly feel compelled to deliver loud and confident opinions, often based on remarkably little insight.
For those who spend their weekends following a club through rain, traffic, expense and occasional humiliation, this can be irritating. It feels a bit like standing next to someone at a concert who only knows the band’s biggest hit – the song you’ve heard so often you can’t stand it anymore. They’re enjoying themselves, which ought to be enough, but somehow it isn’t because it feels as though they’re claiming membership of a club without paying the subscription.
Unlike the long slog of a league season, or the complicated arithmetic of European competitions, the drama is immediate and the maths reassuringly simple
Of course, this protective instinct is only sometimes justified. At its worst, it becomes little more than boorish gatekeeping, because there are actually plenty of perfectly valid reasons why someone might choose to engage with football only during the World Cup. The tournament is short, self-contained and easy to understand. The stakes are obvious. Unlike the long slog of a league season, or the complicated arithmetic of European competitions, the drama is immediate and the maths reassuringly simple.
National-team rivalries are often easier to grasp than the tangled histories of club football. And while commentators occasionally lapse into patronising clichés about some African nations being ‘just pleased to be here’, international football does make it easier to connect with the romance of the underdog. Defending champions crash out in the group stage. Host nations fail to reach the knockout rounds. Unfashionable teams eliminate heavy favourites. It’s free to watch and it can all start to feel intoxicating.
And just as there are good reasons for non-football fans to enjoy the World Cup, there are reasons for committed football fans to dislike it. Every supporter winces when one of their club’s players launches into a 50–50 challenge during a World Cup tie. We watch through our fingers, calculating how many months of the club season might disappear with a badly timed injury.
We tend to notice the shift from a sporting event built around supporters into a corporate spectacle built around consumers. We recognise that organisers increasingly seem less interested in traditional fans than in sponsors, tourists and television numbers. Perhaps we notice these things more readily in international football because they are easier to spot there than in the club game we follow with such blind intimacy.
Which raises the uncomfortable possibility: when we sneer at the people who flock to football every four years, are we really sneering at ourselves? We’re all part-timers sometimes. I usually get excited about the Olympic Games or the World Snooker Championship final, but I pay zero attention to those sports the rest of the year. I lap up the beef of payment day in Four In A Bed but I don’t bother with the other four episodes.
And the first football match I ever watched was the 1979 FA Cup Final. As I sat down that afternoon, I wasn’t a football supporter at all. I was just another newcomer, probably at least as annoying as my texting colleague.
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