What exactly is interesting about club football?

BAR-CLAYS!

Also its bloody good fun.

when your team's top players are hardly ever from the region or even the country

if anything i think this has been great and possibly helping to break down certain barriers. i don't know if some Liverpool or Newcastle fans moan that there aren't enough Scousers or Geordies in their team but i doubt it given the boost the influx of foreigners in the Premiership has given to all clubs. Having a Chelsea first XI with no English players in it isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially given the multiculturalism in society in the big cities, football reflecting that naturally.

But I can see very well the point of supporting England, no matter how crap the team is. Because I'm English, I live in England, I'm part of its culture, I have strong emotional ties to the country, etc., etc. But clubs have become businesses, and their image is their brand. I hate it when it's the brand itself that becomes desirable - wearing Nikes or whatever precisely because they're Nikes. It just strikes me that clubs are much the same, since they don't really stand for anything any more. They're an empty signifier.

don't under-estimate or sneer at the affirming purpose football gives to so many people. to me it's absolutely fair enough that people structure their free time (and sometimes even careers) around supporting a club - it's how they make their friends outside of work, it's how they get to see other parts of the country, it's how they get to express themselves and get stuff out of their system after a hard week's work. as long as it doesn't get nasty or TOO irrational. the money issue is not all that relevant.

we all love those "small" teams doing good. but what makes them small?

it just seems to have got more obvious that there isn't a "flat playing field"

obv. this has long been part of the game.

Matt, all this just supports my point. I'm not against football or people supporting clubs as a form of solidarity, but I can't see why you'd feel tribal about something where the business aspect dominates everything else. When it becomes just another quoted company. If Wimbledon fans walk away from their club to start another one, that's just underlining my point about the difficulties of supporting a club that's nothing more than a money-making enterprise.

i love football but all this "it helps people with crap jobs get throught the week" stuff makes me ill.

xxpost

Fair enough, let me reframe the question to encompass only the clubs that are essentially money-making machines, without too much regard for other considerations.

suck on THAT africa! (but we'll send you some aid!)

If you want to make serious money than running a football club is a lousy way of doing it.

i mean, they don't write the songs, they don't style their own clothes/hair, they probably don't even have their own personality - still, they're pretty, they're (usually) good singers, and the clothes chosen for them are nice, so you like it! And there are probably people who will passionately tell you about how is/are better than .

passionately tell you about how *insert pop band a* is/are better than *insert pop band b*

Well, yes. Manufactured pop bands can be fun, but I don't think I'd want to invest too much emotional capital in them.

Will Young, Gareth Gates, Michelle McManus, Girls Aloud and HearSay to thread.

This is a silly thread digression.

also, how does chelseas side reflect londons multiculturalism? in fact, show me a british team that reflects multicultaralism? perhaps we could list a south-asian football league XI?

By taking what amounts to little more than a league place to Milton Keynes, the bosses of WFC have severed the "club" part away from the community. But, in a vivid example of the fact that the fans make the club, the supporters of Wimbledon neither followed the treacherous, heartless board, not gave up on the game entirely, but made the ffort to feed the vast amounts of spirit, friendship, memory and solidarity into a new entity, and AFC Wimbledon has fulfilled this aim more successfully that any of us could have hoped. The fact that we're 6 divisions below The Other Wimbledon is practcially irrelevant. We're playing, for the first time since 1991, in our own ground, in our own town (pretty much :)), and this time not only do WE (literally) own and run the club, but we're profitable, upwardly mobile, cheap to watch and we're WINNING stuf :)))

More obvious re: level playing field - see previous ILx threads on the increasing uncompetitiveness.

Profit making - very few do. But here's the rub - dividend distributing? Only Man Yoo to my knowledge. As for these global brands ceasing to have relevance - that applies to about 4 clubs out of about 10000 in the world. Like saying that all drinks suck ass because Coke are cunts.

Also, I must point out that use of phrases like Empty Signifier should be used carefully. This board is only big enough for one piss poor user of lit-crit in footballing threads and that, my son, is me innit.

granted Chelsea (for example)'s 'multicultural' team is perhaps not a reflection of our changing society so much as just a reflection of their vast wealth and the relative freedom of the transfer market. i think it's bizarre there aren't more Premiership footballers of Asian descent born in the UK - it's starting to happen slowly tho.

another thing. if you're born in Sheffield and support the Blades as a kid but then move down to London aged 18 you don't switch clubs to reflect your new location of course. people know not to do this and by and large they don't want to - presumably because it's a sign of their roots and they have fond memories of the place...but London's not a good example because there are so many clubs the rivalries are intense. what if the Sheffield guy moved down to Brighton or Southamton? would it be that wrong of them to start taking an interest in and supporting his new local big team (either in tandem with old club or as replacement) - surely this happens?

There's being some absolute nonsense talked on here, mainly by Boyler, Barry and the Stevem/mattdc axis.

Gareth btw - Chesterfields top scorer for many years was a welshman who was offered a job in the pits in Derbyshire so that he would play for us. Bringing in players from outside the area is nothing new in the slightest.

Love for a football club isn't quantifiable, isn't rational and isn't something that can be measured or understood.

i agree that being a football fan isnt something that is quantifiable as such, something that is agreed by most on this thread i think, although i dont think that negates the question, about the gap between club and fans at the top level, and the changing nature of that, since 1945 anway, but also further back.

i am puzzled as to why any of these questions would make you angry though chris, i hope i have not been offensive or wrong-headed in any way

http://ew2.lysator.liu.se/loth/t/a/tansyanne/manticore.jpg

I don't think supporting a football club is irrational. It is weird, but it's not irrational. I think it would be irrational to support one team one week and another team the next week. It would be irrational to support a team because it was at the top of the Premiership so that you ended up supporting 5 or more teams per season.

I think what is weird about supporting a football club is that there is a sense of not having chosen the team that you suppport. Something happens, like seeing a team when you're 6 years old, or moving to a town when you are 9 or something, and the team that gets under your skin at that moment is the one that you will support for the rest of your life. There aren't many things that get to us in this way, but it isn't irrational because of that. It is simply fixed at the point of origin, rather than remaining up for grabs, like nationality and family. I can see how unusual this is in a culture that has such an ideological fixation on choice, but choosing a football club to support would be as irrational as choosing better parents as soon as you become old enough to make the decision for yourself.

Football is "faith-based" in that if you love a team you don't have to explain it, and if you're not interested in a team no one's going to be able to argue you into loving it - there's no logical way in. And yet, standing from a distance, it's possible to say: "it's absurd to invest so much emotion in what has become simply a money-making enterprise". Imagine a culture where people supported rival banks, travelled miles to go shareholder meetings, giving freely of their own spare time and money to publicise their bank... objectively you'd think: "how crazy is that?"

...i wonder if this is a UK thing, what with the continent mainly having sporting clubs where everyone is a member (and the clubs don't make any money either), whereas here there are figureheads who "own" the club('s debts).

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/39880000/jpg/_39880256_playersairport_pa203.jpg

They are quite commercial, but in many ways, they're really erndearingly amatuer when it comes to big buck gathering.

There is NO rhyme nor reason to why I have stuck with Celtic from a childhood infatuation with Charlie Nicholas to them becoming the main reason I moved to Glasgow, from paying large amounts of my meagre student income on watching shite like Wayne Biggins, through the fiasco of penny-pinching directors standing by watching the club i loved going to the dogs right through to the team that beat Barcelona last night. I supported them when they were shit, I support them now they are on a 74 game unbeaten home run, and I will support them when they inevitably go shit again.

They have never been out of the top division, but that doesn't mean they haven't been the longest standing relationship I have had outside of my family and have broken my heart on more occasions than any one or number of individuals < / hornby>.

But as to the question of why is it interesting? It's irrational, there is no comparison outside of sport, and it doesn't matter one flying fuck to anyone who understands. Surely that in itself is enough.

there was other stuff in the original edit of this post that explained that they seemed good on paper but were shit in real life and that didn't stop me loving them like no other thing I could compare them to. but i seem to have deleted that prior to posting and it is late and i am pissed a bit, and can't remember what I was talking about. so i know it makes no real sense, but sorry.

I hope people know what i mean though

The second because, well, football is part of the rest of the world and because the people who are fans of football think and act in the ordinary world. Football isn't a foreign language; it is sunk deep into the common culture.

The first, for the reasons upthread: it would actually be irrational if football fans made choices like shoppers rather than stuck together like families or communities.

Re the first point, I didn't say the way you act once you'd got there was rational, it's that the choosing and sticking with a club is frankly silly if you look at it. There is nothing except history to connect the club I support now with the one I supported twenty years ago. No player, director or member of the management hierarchy remains, and the stadium is virtually unrecognisable (not to mention the season playing elsewhere whilst Parkhead was being rebuilt). There's no real reason to maintain loyalty to an ever changing entity. It's probably like continuing to watch Coronation Street even though virtually the whole cast has changed in my lifetime.

Point 2. If football was so ingrained in the popular culture, then there would be no need to ask the question posed in the title of this thread. People who don't get it tend to view it as something akin to madness. I know a lot of people who will never understand why I took three days unpaid leave and flew to Seville on hideously overpriced flights for a football match (the flight and leave were arranged before I knew I had a ticket for the match) and also why I will sit in the snow watching meaningless games that are live on the TV.

I didn't football was unique, but witness the abandonment of loyalty on the hockey thread. "Your team are shit, start supporting team X instead". Not for one minute throughout the Lou Macari or John Barnes era, not when Rangers were winning everything and Celtic were being ritually humiliated by every team in Scotland (and further afield - Neuchatel Xamax, I'm talking about you), not ONCE did I ever contemplate giving it up for an easier life. If my husband broke my heart, ruined my dreams and made my days hell half as much as being a Celtic fan ever did, I'd leave him. But give me my team and I'll always stick by them. Does that seem rational to you, when they don't really give anything back?

It's just something I do, by and large on my own.

(x post)

oddly, i find supporting a club side much easier. far more difficult to convince me i should support england just because thats where i happen to have been born / live, as its far more difficult to feel the personal connections / kinship with other england fans than it is with fans of yr club side ?

you are an ever changing entity, and so is your place of birth; your parents are ever changing entities and so is your language. What makes these things permanent - and therefore makes your continued attachment to them rational - is not that they are preserved in aspic at the moment that you first encounter them. Quite the opposite. To insist on them not changing would be irrational. This would be like saying that Eastenders shouldn't be called Eastenders anymore because hardly any of the original cast are still in it. That's not what makes Eastenders Eastenders.

Saussure makes an interesting point about this too. The 7.15 to Glasgow is the 7.15 whether is leaves at 7.22 or 7.45 - it is not its physical attributes that makes it the 7.15, it is its place within the system of the train timetable. Therefore, Liverpool FC is not a place, a group of players, or any other physical thing. Liverpool FC is more like a narrative than an object.

There is a real reason to maintain loyalty to an ever changing entity - whether that be a parent, a spouse, or a football club. Loyalty is not an attachment to a thing necessarily, it is a commitment to a history.

I prefer to think of it more as a fiasco (French, from Italian fare fiasco, to make a bottle, fail, from fiasco, bottle (perhaps translation of French bouteille, bottle, error, used by the French for linguistic errors committed by Italian actors on the 18th-century French stage).