My name is Tom, and I am a football fan
I’ve loved football since I was very young, yet at times I have a strange relationship with the idea of being a football fan and can feel conflicted about my love of the beautiful game.
I grew up on a quiet street where kids would play out after school and football was a big part of this. The family who lived opposite had three sons and two played at youth level for Oxford United. They also ran the local sweet shop, which from the perspective of a a five-year-old, is one of the coolest jobs you could ever have! I still remember a day we convinced loads of parents to come out and play and took over the whole street.
I’ve played in teams since the age of seven and the late 80s madness of playing 11-a-side on full-sized adult pitches. It was the era of ‘if in doubt, kick it out’ and the key skills being how far you could lump the ball forward. I played in a 5-a-side team at university and an 11-a-side team on Hackney Marshes. I now play a weekly 7-a-side game with my brother-in-law and a collection of our friends. We’re at the ‘if I can avoid getting injured that is a win’ stage of our careers, with lots of dissecting of the game in the pub afterwards.
We’ve had Arsenal season tickets in our family since I was 16 (my first season ticket was £148) and I had a Bristol Rovers season ticket while I was at university (£50). I have watched and played in thousands of games of football over the last 30+ years.
It’s hard not to read this and think ‘Tom is a massive football fan’ and it would be silly to deny it. But I sometimes don’t want people to think of me as a football fan, especially those who aren’t fans.
I can reel off so many good reasons not to like football. Some of the most overt homophobia, anti-semitism and racism I have witnessed has been at football matches. I’ve seen horrible violence, in games I’ve attended and played in, and know that domestic violence surges when England gets knocked out of major tournaments. The money in the game is obscene and an increasing number of countries use football to divert attention away from their awful human rights records.
Football is bad in many ways, yet I still go and spend my money on it. At the weekend I watched Arsenal beat Liverpool and I loved it. The moment when the third goal went in and I’m jumping and shouting and hugging strangers cannot be replicated in any of the other things I love. Amy Lawrence described it far better than me on an Arsenal podcast:
“These are the moments why we choose football, or why football chooses us. There’s a whole world of stuff out there, yet people are magnetised by football precisly because it makes us feel stuff.”
Football makes me feel so much but I can still be shy about it. There is a Monday morning freelancer check-in I have joined a couple of times recently. It has happened to coincide with being the Monday after an Arsenal game, so in the ‘How was your weekend?’ section I have mentioned going to football. The first time, having not met some of the people before, I felt weird about what my weekend had entailed. I don’t always want people’s first impression of me to be ‘massive football fan’. I worry that it acts as a limiter on what or who I might be, what other interests I might have, and what opinions I might hold. Like football feels so obvious somehow. I find myself overcompensating, shoehorning in references to other interests in my life in the hope of trying to seem more rounded and interesting.
I get that this is me projecting onto others what they might be feeling about football and therefore what they think about me. We all make judgements about people based on their interests. Whether that is football, yoga, music, board games or the multitude of things people give their attention to. We find our tribes. I guess it is partly about me not wanting to be in just one group. We all use these interest/attention markers to help our relationships (the ‘did you see the traitors yesterday?’ moment.)
I’m writing about how football can make me feel excluded or judged but there are so many occasions when my fandom has made me feel included in a way that non-football fans are not. I get that the seemingly omnipresence of football must be a lot for the less interested.
I’m far less conflicted about playing football. Our regular kickabout on a Wednesday has become really important to me. It has a protected status in the family diary. For many of us, it is a guarantee of some exercise and an hour away from everything else. As a group of 40+ men, we have discussed how important it feels to know we have an hour a week where we don’t think about anything other than playing football. It’s a sort of meditation for people for whom more traditional meditation doesn’t. That plus a drink with friends in the pub. I feel it when I miss it, especially if I’m injured.
There have been times when my love of football has wavered. As a teenager, I began to lose some of my love of playing football. I was small and wasn’t physical enough. I became nervous about making mistakes. My Dad was one of three or four parents who drove me and my teammates to games every Sunday morning. He also ran the line in a hat that was knitted by my Granny. The Sunday morning linesman is not a role for the faint-hearted and not something you necessarily want your Dad doing as a self-conscious teenager. It took me a while to appreciate how lucky I was to have a Dad who drove us to games every Sunday morning for eight years.
There was a chance that I’d drift away from football but it didn’t quite happen. I always loved going to games with my parents when I was a teenager. The train into London, the walk to Highbury, talking about the game on the way home. It helped that Arsenal were good!
My love of playing came back as I got out of my awkward teenage years and I’ll keep playing as long as my body allows. I’m not sure what my limits are on watching Premier League football and all that goes with it. I hope these don’t get tested any further, then maybe one day some of the forever memories of our daughter will involve Arsenal. I’d love that.
