The brilliant German comedian Henning Wehn has shared the above excerpt from a piece that originally appeared on the media outlet Reading Today, which you can read in its entirety here. Not for the first time, Reading Football Club is in the shit following a failed takeover attempt and the local Supporters Trust is urgently seeking clarification as to where this leaves them. Near the end of the article, as you can see, the Trust urges “fans to look after each other and their own mental well-being. To support this, Johnny Hunt will be running a Talking Royals session tomorrow at 7.00pm. If you are struggling, please do not hesitate to reach out.” Decent, solid advice, you might say. I would be the last person to ridicule those suffering from poor mental health, but this is a football club, that’s all. Is this really enough to get depressed about?
Well, possibly. An old acquaintance from my active Bristol Rovers supporting days once told me that he stopped attending matches on the advice of his therapist who told him, “Supporting the Rovers is making your clinical depression worse.” I had no reason to query his diagnosis, although I did reply that while supporting the Rovers often made me fed up to the point of despair, for me it was not a direct mental health issue. In fact, on balance there were more positives than negatives, mainly meeting up with friends who otherwise I might rarely or barely ever see. Increasingly, the football itself became a secondary issue until one day it until it didn’t become an issue at all, from 2018, when I stopped going altogether, likely forever. The effects on my mental health were somewhere between negligible and non-existent.
I do know that for many years I utterly obsessed with football. It was not my only focus in life, but there were times it wasn’t that far off. If I wasn’t going to games, I was deep into football forums and just about everything else to do with the club. Holidays and social events were tailored carefully to ensure that my attendance at home matches was the main priority. A holiday or a weekend away? “Well, just hang on. Are we home or away? Fancy a few pints with friends or a round of golf this Saturday? Sorry, but we’re at home to Crawley Town. Can’t you just fit in with me and my life?” With that degree of commitment, maybe I should have been committed, but in truth I got more positives out of it than negatives.
I am me, I am not a concerned Reading fan, so I cannot see into all their minds about their ownership concerns. If some fans, maybe a lot of fans, are feeling that their mental health is under under strain as a result of the club’s future, then I would certainly suggest a visit to the GP. Depression and anxiety are illnesses, despite the assertion of former prime minister Rishi Sunak that we were now part of a “sick note culture” and, worse still, that we were at risk of “over-medicalising” normal worries by diagnosing them as mental health conditions. I value the opinion of a medical expert over and above those of an out-of-touch here today, gone tomorrow politician like Sunak, but having said that if someone is allowing football to rule their lives to the extent it could be making them sick then there are decisions to be made by the individuals concerned.
Maybe those affected could even become more involved, by joining the Supporters Trust, for example. There, they could exert at least some direct influence into the running and the future of the club. A more hands-on approach, taking control of a situation rather than allowing things to drift? Or there is another option. Just walk away.
I know plenty of Bristol Rovers fans who have walked away over the years, for a wide variety of reasons. Some have returned, others like me have moved on, reluctantly at first, but now don’t regret our decisions one bit. I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. But, I repeat, I don’t think it was making me sick enough before and I’m still sick today.
My own view is that if you are participating in anything that is having a negative effect on your mental health, then deal with it by, first, having your mental health assessed by a professional medic and then by considering your priorities. It can be done. It is possible – and I know it is possible because I have seen people do it – to change the way you support a team. Maybe just look at what you did when you started watching football as a kid. You just watched a game, talked about it and then went home. You didn’t worry about things you couldn’t change, you didn’t fret about the ownership model or how much money the club was losing. If others wanted to concern themselves with other stuff, well just let them.
Sure “fans to look after each other and their own mental well-being” but people, in my old fashioned world, should do that anyway. Supporting all bar the most successful clubs is often a miserable experience, with many ups and downs along the way and it has always been thus. Life is hard enough and there’s so much else to worry about than football. It isn’t a matter of life or death, or at least it shouldn’t be. If it is, do something about it or do something else.
