It is important to say at the start of this blog that my disillusionment with football did not begin with the loathsome behaviour of some supporters. Indeed, I began to fall out love with the so-called Beautiful Game around 20 years ago as a result of a major fall-out between the directors of my old club Bristol Rovers. I have no intention of rehashing or rewriting history, except to say that I made the fatal mistake of backing the losing side, which supported modernisation and sustainability as opposed to the boom and bust strategy of previous years that had taken the club to the basement division of the English Football League (EFL). Eight years later, in 2014, with boom and bust continuing to be the main driver the club Rovers were relegated to non league football. No one was in the mood to say, ‘Told you so’ because no one needed to.
Falling out of love with the only club I have ever actively supported was, in some ways, a painful process. After a period away from the club, I returned, but the thrill had gone. I felt that I was almost watching the game as a neutral and not in the one-eyed way supporters are meant to behave. Not every referee was biased against my team, the controversial penalty given against us wasn’t controversial at all and actually the EFL didn’t have it in for us. Once you start watching football in an impartial way, the passion has gone. The only bit I loved was seeing my mates. The football just got in the way. In 2018, something had to give and it was me. I walked away never to return. But some things had changed long before then.
The one-eyed fan that I no longer was became more aware of how one-eyed everyone around me was. What’s more, they were all 100% in the right. It is not the role of the supporter to blithely accept that your team lost because the opposition was better. You’re there to see, and if possible help, your team win. You appeal for decisions you know you don’t deserve, you call for penalties you know aren’t really penalties, you try to rile the opposition, especially if you think it might help get someone sent off. I clapped and cheered at the right moments, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was a fully paid-up hypocrite. It wasn’t just the blinkered outlook of the football fan I observed: it was the hateful abuse.
During one game, a man not far away started to heckle and then abuse the Millwall player Neil Harris. But this wasn’t abuse of a footballing nature. It was highly personal. The man was calling Harris out because he had suffered from testicular cancer and the barrage of abuse, from one man I hasten to add, was sickening, culminating in Harris being referred to loudly and repeatedly as a eunuch. I have no doubt that Harris will have heard it, as we will have heard it at other grounds, but for some reason – perhaps because I am rather old-fashioned about these things – I found it extremely offensive. I did not and do not see anything funny about any form of cancer, not just testicular cancer. The steward I told about it said he hadn’t heard it so there was nothing he could reasonably do. I didn’t want to be there any more. Within a short period of time, I wasn’t.
Some years later, my two sons attended a game at the Rovers and observed some dreadful homophobia, which they called out only to be greeted with a volley of abuse. It was “only” a group of men but my boys left the ground never to return. To their credit, the club did investigate the claims but in the end there was not enough evidence to take action, although they did discover the identity of the homophobes. More recently, a supporter received a banning order to racially abusing a visiting player so, again, fair play to the club, but it just made me more determined not to go back. (It’s very fair to suggest I may have been looking for additional reasons to not go. I honestly don’t know the answer to that.)
I’ve been getting mad about a minority of people and that most supporters, the overwhelming majority in fact, are better than that. But the truth is that all football clubs have their haters. Just look at the photograph heading this blog. A Tottenham fan is waving his mobile phone around, which is a photograph of Arsenal captain Declan Rice’s partner and the mother of his child. Rice’s partner has had to put up with horrendous abuse on social media, apparently because of her appearance, and this clown, who has paid top dollar for a front row ticket, is joining in the ‘fun’. This man and his mates will be doing this, they will say, to put Rice off his game. He’s fair game. But is he? Is he really? More than that, is Rice’s partner fair game, too? Again, you may say I am looking for excuses to further fall out of love with football, and that may be true, but it’s working.
Nowadays, I don’t support any team and barely watch any games at all but the hatred is still there. The distorted faces of the Nottingham Forest fans as they abused Mo Salah as he took corners was not great to watch, but let’s be clear: it happens everywhere. That Rice’s Arsenal went on to give his abuser’s team a right dicking and that Salah’s Liverpool won right at the death will hopefully have ruined some people’s afternoons. Good.
It’s me that’s changed, not football. My slow divorce from Bristol Rovers has coincided with my diminishing levels of tolerance of hate and abuse. If another way of putting that is to say I have lost my passion, then so be it. If I have lost some of the passion called hate, then maybe I’m a better person for it.
Football’s premier broadcaster does its best to blot out much of the hate, by not showing too many close-ups of angry fans and by distorting the more colourful terrace chants and songs, but if you look hard enough it’s still there.
Maybe it is just banter (or bants, as the young folk call it) and things are the same as they always were, perhaps not as bad as they used to be? And most fans aren’t like that. Certainly none of my friends who still attend games engage in racism, homophobia or abuse based upon one man’s experience of testicular cancer and good for them. The main reason I don’t got to the Rovers anymore is because I have lost the emotional attachment. It’s as simple as that. It’s probably why I don’t go to other EFL games, either. Been there, done that, bought the T shirt, grown out of it, time to move on. Football was the nearest I got to religion and I’ve definitely lost mine.
