I am here to save your life, and I’m not kidding. This isn’t about the state of discourse on the internet, or nostalgia for some imaginary pastoral of 1950s civility, or making sure I don’t get yelled at in blog comments. This is about you, and how you are going to live in the world. I mean how you’re going to live as a sports fan, but let there be no limit to the revelation: I mean how you’re going to live in every other way, too.
I don’t care about role models, but you can’t tell the story of rage in soccer without talking about managers, so we might as well start with them. Because the truth is, as I am not the first to notice, that we are living in a world in which every coach of any importance reacts to all adversity by blaming someone else, hinting at plots, or gazing into the astral distance and knitting his brow in a way that suggests some dark mysterious flaw at the heart of the game. It isn’t just Mourinho (or Ferguson, or Wenger, or whoever’s in the headlines for it this week). There is an increasingly sweeping assumption abroad that the only thing that can keep a plan from succeeding is injustice, or to put it differently, that if things don’t go your way, it’s because something is wrong, maybe something big. That “something” is important, because it’s never really just about the referee. The anger of managers who are complaining in a press conference often has an abstract, gloomy, even melancholy quality just beneath the surface, which you could possibly explain away as the inevitable sadness of a loss, but which has recently struck me as a sign of something deeper: it’s as if the manager, while outwardly complaining about the referee, is inwardly transfixed by the apprehension of a vastly larger problem, a problem of which the referee is only the easiest piece to explain.
For the Wengers, Mourinhos, Fergusons, et. al., it’s as if soccer itself, the entire system of the game, has splintered into fragments, and the fragments have somehow shifted in such a way that things no longer work the way they’re supposed to. From the outside, the system looks almost the same, but from the inside, there’s a subtle difference, a minor bias against earnest efforts that would succeed if the bias weren’t there. The referee may be the most obvious sign of that bias—its avatar, so to speak—but I think the apprehension itself points to something more vague and atmospheric than conscious and deliberate. That is, I don’t think that Mourinho really believes that real individuals within UEFA are involved in a concrete conspiracy against him. But he also isn’t making things up. He senses that something is wrong, even if it’s impossible to articulate exactly what it is. One of the reasons that the post-game complaints of managers seem so unhinged and rant-y, I think, is that coaches are driven to exaggeration and rage by the need to be specific and plausible about something that probably feels to them like magic.
Maybe that sounds overblown, but is it really so far away from what fans experience all the time? I suspect that one of the reasons we’re so fascinated by, and so hard on, managerial rants is that they give us back grotesque versions of our own feelings. Especially in sports, which is deliberately designed to flood your brain with testosterone, we’ve all experienced that mind-snapping moment where some bit of bad luck or perceived unfairness sends you hurtling over the edge. As fans, we’ve lived through losses that made us think no—no—that can’t be right—this isn’t right, losses that made us feel utterly, metaphysically thwarted. And at those instants when your brain simply refuses to accept what’s happening, “the truth” is a concept that has no relevance to anything you think. You don’t believe or disbelieve, you just know in an overpowering way that the universe is somehow against you, and seize on whatever evidence comes to hand to give form to the feeling. You and your friends jump out of your chairs, point at the TV, and yell gibberish. You have marauding, embittered conversations. And then later, you hear a manager for a different team saying the same sorts of things you were thinking, and it’s so obviously ridiculous, and everyone is making fun of him, and you do, too, even though on some level it feels like an omen.
And all this is totally natural and timeless and circle-of-life—Achilles was a Real Madrid fan. The problem is (and again, I’m not the first person to notice this) that for a lot of people, that rage-tap is getting harder and harder to shut off. Anger is increasingly becoming a default element in how people interact with the games they follow, and that’s true for soccer fans to a much greater extent than most sports fans. It’s becoming a constant. The ubiquity of the unhinged managerial press conference is an obvious symptom of this. It’s as if flashes of brief, intense fury still occur, but instead of dissipating all the way, they now leave behind a weird residue of obscure rage that releases itself in conspiracy blather and persecution complexes. Real Madrid fans think the universe is against them and for Barcelona. Manchester United fans think referees are out to target them (why? because they’re Manchester United); fans of other teams think Manchester United get all the breaks (why? same reason). When you become a low-grade-rage fan, your club is always in the right, and truth has nothing to do with it. “If you simply look at the evidence…” was the cry I heard from both Rangers and Celtic fans after my piece on the Old Firm rivalry last month. Earlier this week, when I was writing for Slate on El Clásico, it hit me that soccer has devolved into a realm a little like politics, a realm where fans’ access to preconceived explanations that suit their emotional allegiances is drowning reality out of the discourse.
The internet has something to do with that, of course, but it’s more a function of the world the internet calls home. Richard’s piece on hyperreality in El Clásico put this in context for me. This is just one way of looking at the issue, and again, it might sound overblown. But it seems persuasive to me that the insane digital-age fragmentation of the experience of being a soccer fan—endless replication, endless mediation, endless interpretation—has meant that fans are no longer in a position to define the meaning of what they see: there’s always another angle, another opinion, another giant voice from the media echoing in your head. Something is always slightly wrong with your perceptions. And when meanings come unmoored in that way, hyperpartisanship becomes extremely attractive. Hyperpartisanship promises to give everything a clear meaning, because it gives you a single, simple principle to test all meanings against. Your club itself becomes the index of all meaning in the game. But hyperpartisanship is always running up against the limits of its own efficacy, both because the games still have to be played on the pitch and because it’s incapable of triumphing over either other people’s competing hyperpartisanship or the displaced media narratives that hyperpartisanship was an alternative to in the first place. There’s still reality, and there are still other explanations. Reality and other explanations are both irritants to the hyperpartisan worldview, but hyperpartisanship can never admit this without admitting that it’s basically delusional. The result is that mysterious, low-grade rage.
And here’s where I save your life. Because the truth about hyperpartisanship is that it is an absolutely miserable and unpleasant way to be a sports fan. No one talks about this, because (a) people who complain about rage in sports tend to want to mourn some lost standard of politeness, which has nothing to do with anything, and (b) because hyperpartisan fans are the most outwardly invested in their clubs, so there’s a presumption that they’re the most authentic or admirable supporters, even if they’re also, everyone knows, unbearably obnoxious. It’s the last bit, the presumption of authenticity, that’s the most concerning, because if you’re just getting into soccer, and you love your club, well, then you don’t want anyone to be more totally into your club than you are. So especially if you’re already surrounded by a lot of hyperpartisan fans in your daily life, your instinct may be to go in with blinders on and drink from the chalice of the faith.
The problem is that by doing so, you condemn yourself to a life of always being at least a little angry about a thing you supposedly love, a life of storing up slights and spinning them into bitter little stories, a life of basically hostile, suspicious, and un-fun commitment to a thing that only exists to give you joy. The sole and entire point of sports is to enjoy sports; even if you think athletic competition has a deeper purpose, that it helps with moral instruction or enforcing community ties or whatever else, it’s only able to serve that purpose because it’s fun in the first place. If your love of soccer has brought you to a point where you’re no longer really able to see the game as something wonderful and amazing except in narrow moments of unequivocal triumph, then you are doing it wrong, no matter how many kills you rack up on the internet. On that note, it’s also not unimportant that the mind-warp of hyperpartisanship is eventually going to make you think and say things that are, let’s be frank, really fucking stupid, and that there’s no need for you to be really fucking stupid just to support your club. Last week I heard from two separate Madrid fans who tortured themselves through an argument that Barcelona are actually the most negative team in soccer, and especially when they play Madrid. Anything is beautiful if you say it is, but like Mourinho’s postgame spy novel, that was a pretty big stretch.
Now, obviously the odds are good that if you’re hanging out on this site in the first place, you’re not spending your nights standing vigil over your Chelsea scabbard and cursing Tom Henning Øvrebø. And if you’re not, this will probably sound quaint in about fifteen ways. But maybe you’re a kid, or a grown-up who’s tired of this stuff. So look: don’t be like this. There’s no reason to. It’s really, really easy not to be, once you decide you don’t want to. The secret is to care, I mean really care, about something other than your club. That thing can be the game itself, or the truth, or just being a reasonable person. You can care about something other than your club and still be totallysupercommitted to your club. It doesn’t mean not supporting your team through thick and thin; it just means being able to tell the difference between thick and thin, and not thinking that your favorite forum, or your group of like-minded supporters, is so important that it throws reality on the wrong end of a greater-than sign. It means doing this for fun, and not for revenge or for a sense of deep-down defining identity, even if you’re a crazy tattooed ultra. You can be a crazy tattooed ultra and still be fine, for that matter. You just can’t be an idiot.
“Here comes Crazy Forum-Poster Rafa,” I used to think during Benítez’s wilder press conferences. In the same way, I remember once making a note, though I don’t think I ever followed it up with a post, about how Alex Ferguson was like a deranged blog commenter filling up the space beneath his own matches.
That’s my impression, anyway, though admittedly I don’t spend much time in water polo forums.
I.e., Waterloo wasn’t won on the playing fields of Eton because people hated being on the playing fields of Eton and got out of there as fast as they could.
Read More: rage
by Brian Phillips · May 5, 2011
Co-sign.
This is basically the fandom essay I’ve been waiting three years to read — and I don’t even follow soccer.
This is perhaps the most outrageously bad writing on soccer the world has ever seen. Congratulations are in order, I suppose.
Bravo, sir.
This piece is like a tree falling in the forest. Partisans will never read it.
Well said.
The other side of the fan spectrum, the willingly oblivious, is just as obnoxious. When you refuse to admit that a player dove even after replays clearly showed that he did, there’s a problem.
Support your teams, yeah, but don’t delude yourself in the process.
Ya so, uhm, this is really good. A link to it should pop up whenever someone posts a comment on YouTube.
And not just on the soccer videos.
This. Is. Brilliant.
Fabulous.
“You just know in an overpowering way that the universe is somehow against you, and seize on whatever evidence comes to hand to give form to the feeling.” — I might amend that slightly to say that “whatever comes to hand” is instantly redescribed as evidence. It undergoes that transformation and can’t, or can’t readily, be reconverted. Thus the Pepe-Alves video from last week becomes like the fetishized film footage in Pattern Recognition>> or (in extremis) like the Entertainment in Infinite Jest. The question is: what makes it possible to come back from hyperreal hyperinterpretation of events and the distributed records of events?
@Alan Jacobs I hate when I mess up my tags.
Kenny Dalglish after recently losing 3-1 to lowly West Ham: “We never passed it as well as we can or took the opportunities that came our way. The last 20 or 25 minutes, we started to play a wee bit like we can. We got the goal near the end and we thought we might steal a point. There were a couple of shouts for a penalty, things that are outside our control that you can’t manage, but we’ll try to correct the mistakes we made.”
I see your point, think its a good one and wish I could convert. But I’ll put down my hyperfandom defense of my club (Real Madrid) when they put down their hypocrisy (Barca). I can admit the defects, losses and unattractive behavior of my club but I won’t sit quietly when a rival fan claims to have none of their own. If that is irrational, well, so be it.
Excellent stuff. However, I disagree with the idea that soccer has “devolved into a realm a little like politics” for supporters. I’d argue that soccer is politics for supporters. But I won’t argue that point here; I’m an awful writer.
You’re only saying this because YOUR TEAM SUCKS!!!!
@MightyMightyDR If it helps, that line was probably too vague. I’m talking about a very specific sort of post-internet/cable news political debate, not the populist history of left/right divisions amongst clubs, etc.
The problem is that hyperpartisans tend to not realize they have become irrational or that they don’t care. We have become a society of everyone insisting the world around them is mad except for an island of sanity “I” and a select few just happen to be living on. Fo all I know, I’m a hyperpartisan.
Logic and perspective on the internet in general (and especially in sports fandom) feels all-too-quaint these days but well-put, sir.
This nicely sums up what most have us have been bitching about increasingly often, especially this season when things have reached a new low. But as well as so many fans believing in conspiracy theories, it’s the abuse that writers get if they criticise a big club (even if all the evidence suggests the writer is correct) that is so hugely wearisome. As you say, it’s supposed to be fun.
This is absolutely incredible, and a fantastic complement on fan behaviour to the FreeDarko essay on “liberated fandom” that I go back to every month or so like some sort of religious text.
When I was younger, I was a massive fan of the Vancouver Canucks (during the time best known as the Bure years), but my love for the team has been dampened, if not totally extinguished, by the behaviour and attitudes of that team’s fans. I’m glad that you’ve written this, if only because it demonstrates that more options are available than the hyperpartisan’s binary dictum: “love it or leave it.”
Fantastic stuff.
God, I wish I had written this.
Outstanding article.
I caught myself getting a tad too wound up in last season’s Serie A vis a vis between Inter and Roma (perhaps too much Mourinho magic affecting fans on both sides?), and frankly, this season has brought me back down to earth emotionally. And of the leagues to follow, Italy is rife with conspiracy theories and squabbling, which remains exacerbated by seeing those worst fears confirmed a half-decade ago.
Might there be something to be said for supporting big clubs and big brands that gives their fans a sense of entitlement about how to behave around other sports fans? Perhaps the combination of that and the relative anonymity of the Internet creates an echo chamber that exaggerates things and creates the one-upsmanship of real vs. plastic.
As much as I thought four Clasicos would be awesome, it brought out the worst in people, and I expect the lead-up to the Champions League final won’t be much better regarding the “insufferable fan” factor on either side.
Delicious food for thought, Brian. Thank you.
Yes, I must echo the sentiment of someone else. This could be applied to fandom, period, and I have been involved in a gazillion fandoms outside of football.
Though part of me now wants to direct you to read Cassandra Claire’s fandom wiki
Why can’t I articulate myself like this?
Hear, hear.
As I said to a friend before El Clasico Mk IV, I would have said that four Clasicos in three weeks has caused football fandom’s collective brains to leak out their collective ears, except that what four Clasicos in three weeks has proven is that football fandom never had any brains to begin with. You can be a crazy tattooed ultra and still be fine, for that matter. You just can’t be an idiot. should pop up, like an obnoxious add for MAK $$$$ IN UR SPAR TIEM, every time someone tries to write something on the internet. Or say something to a camera, for that matter.
Allow me to spontaneously say two words. Big Soccer. Is anonymity the fuel on the fire of anger?
You’ve captured why I have difficulty being around anyone from Boston.
Two things bother me about the situations you describe:
1. The notion that support is a competitive endeavor
2. The continued presence of the guy who is more interested in being known as a soccer fan than being an actual soccer fan.
These are ego-maniacal and narcissistic endeavors which will never be solved by such a well-written piece as yours. These people are the soccer equivalent of birthers and those who doubt bin Laden is dead.
Man, I got a right to be hostile. My people been persecuted!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcv3McUVyAo
“Prophets of Rage”, from the legendary Public Enemy album It Takes UEFA Millions to Hold Us Back
I really love it when you get emotional. Once again, I wish you were a cricket fan.
Also, thank you so much for “Achilles was a Real Madrid fan.”
@Brian Phillips Thanks for the addendum. You’re right: being a soccer fan too often mirrors being a commenter on Fox Nation or Daily Kos.
I salute you for writing this and only wish that it wasn’t always and ever going to be only your soccer blog thing that would write this.
One of the great gifts sports can give you is the opportunity to see so very clearly that you get to decide how you will respond to things in the world, sports included.
Warren Barton and BigSoccer sure as shit aren’t going to want to tell you this, but that’s OK. Warren Barton and BigSoccer are there to keep the little anxiety factory in your brain chugging along. But you’ve got the power to vaporize the hair gel and banner ads.
And it’s funny, but as soon as you do, you instantly start to appreciate the fact that you live in the same world as, say, Emmanuel Eboue.
As a reformed hyperpartisan, I can say this article is spot on. These are the exact thoughts I had a couple years back when sports became un-fun, only expressed in a way that only Brian Phillips can. You can bet I’ll be spreading this article all over the hyperpartisan forums I’m still a part of (with the permission of Phillips, of course). Also this article translates throughout all other sports, especially American football. Well done, Brian.
Fantastic points, and can be applied across many, many sports fandoms.
Well done, good sir.
I’ll throw my hat into the ring – As a huge Barcelona fan and a fan of the game itself, I’m sick and tired of Busquets and Alves and Mascherano and Pique (etc) either A) Egregiously diving or B) Quickly surrounding the referee and pleading their case as though their lives were on line.
Just cut it out. It makes Barcelona look like a bunch of whiners, it makes Spanish soccer look petty and it completely turns off neutral/non fans if they happen to be watching.
I will always love the Blaugrana… and my love compels me to call them out on this point for the good of the game itself.
Recently we’ve seen pieces on why Munich, Hillsborough and Heysel taunts and chants just absolutely have to stop. Iain MacIntosh wrote one, and there were at least a couple others too. There was nothing wrong with those, but they amounted to (a very common sense) pleading for civility without getting into what this piece does. While not directly addressing those disasters and how the chants are miserable and destructive, these piece is a much more constructive look at how to change behaviors. That’s why I think we should be linking to it, retweeting it and however else sharing is done these days. Here it might just be mostly preaching to the choir, but spread it around and enough people might be exposed to it to change some minds.
Just assuming disgusting people who bother us are too stupid to see the error of their ways isn’t a reaction worthy of what this writing is trying to accomplish.
Fuck Clemson?
Wonderful stuff, Brian.
Still, there was one tiny glimmer of hope earlier today, when this view of the Great Clásico Cataclism of 2011 quietly appeared on the El País website:
I think that in both legs [of the Champions League semi] there were certain decisions that did hurt Real Madrid in the final result (Pepe’s sending-off in the first leg and Higuaín’s disallowed goal in the second). But it’s one thing to say that and quite another to believe that Barça are being helped out deliberately. Avoiding that trap is the best way to focus on your own mistakes so you can correct them. Falling into it is the exact opposite.
I think all neutrals, most Barça fans and a not insignificant number of Real Madrid fans would second that. So who said it? It was Santiago Solari, former much-loved Real Madrid player and erstwhile cohort of Ronaldo, Zidane and company. Good, eh?
Another bit of Netritus doing the rounds today is a photograph of a goal end at a crowded stadium with a huge banner, which translated reads: “REFEREES’ BIAS IS SOUGHT BY THOSE WHO ONLY KNOW HOW TO CRY.” But it wasn’t in Catalan, being held up by the Boixos Nois; it was in Spanish, made by the Ultras Sur at the Bernabéu – in 2004, when today’s underdogs were the overdogs and long before the brains of so many (most?) Real Madrid fans had been so thoroughly Moumified.
Will things return to normality and rationality some day soon? If the Champions League final is a great match, toughly but fairly disputed, with both teams (especially – please, God, please – Manchester United) ending up with 11 players on the pitch, then I think they just might. Otherwise, I fear The Rage is going to grip us all, like the cast of the George A. Romero movie to end all George A. Romero movies.
This is the piece that’s been in my head for months and I’ve not got round to articulating yet. Possibly the best thing written about football this year.
Yeah, I’ve been wondering about my own club support recently (read: the past month). Not that I’m on the hardcore side of the spectrum, but I have noticed a gradual drift towards that side (maybe all that Mou is rubbing off on me…) and away from the calm and collected side. This is a good little nudge reminding me that another perspective exists. Great article.
In short, I guess maybe Pepe was a little rough,
but come on! Higuain’s goal?!
“The secret is to care, I mean really care, about something other than your club. That thing can be the game itself, or the truth, or just being a reasonable person.”
I fear hyperpartisanship presents itself in a far more seducing embodiment than the game itself. In the modern day game the line between realism and cynism is slowly fading for me, this at any level when viewing my opponents as a youth coach. I suppose the comfort of your own righteousness in your own closed world transcends the truth of a game where cheating has become moraly accepted by most since it is ‘part of the game’ and where negative tactics must make some players hate their job, that is if they started playing for the love of the ball, as we all did I presume.
Truly excellent post.
I have a question though that maybe somebody could throw a light on. I’ve always been a Barcelona fan, being Dutch will do that to you. However, for as long as I can remember, i’ve respected Real Madrid greatly. I teared up a bit last wednesday realizing I could be witnessing Raul’s last CL game, for example.
So I have never considered myself hyperpartisan. But lately i’ve felt that the sense of respect i’ve always shown towards Madrid hasn’t been answered in kind. And by that I dont mean to me personally, but to Barcelona. The daily papers from either city have never been respectful, and players on both sides have said emotional and retarded things in interviews for years. But to me, the line was crossed when the official website of Real started participating in this mess.
I already know that the fact that I think the source of all of this comes from “the other party” makes me an idiot. I am immensely tired of feeling like one, even considering not watching the remaining Classicos. They made me realize that those moments of unequivocal triumph never come, as the ability of some people to deny the facts, even when confronted with empirical evidence, prevents that. So I feel that im being pushed more towards this idiot fan behaviour by a party not respecting the terms, so to speak.
Like Wenger, I didn’t see this.
great piece.
I disagree with one of the premises though. I abandoned hyperpartisanship years ago but I still spend most of my team watching football being angry.
@Tonyto I hope Liverpool find new glory under Dalglish. He’s a class act, and that quote is just one of many ways he’s shown that.
@Brian Phillips Tremendous stuff. You could spread this thesis to most facets of modern life.
I’m a long time Arsenal fan, but when I read articles describing the various failings of Arsenal players/fans/coaches I usually find plenty to agree with. Blind love can be just as damaging as blind rage.
I always ascribed the familial aspect of football clubs to the seemed fact that they do indeed reject rationality, and become enraptured by the blood type relationship they feel with their club. you, right or wrong, so to speak.
i guess this is a bit intense for the author. more an emirates guy than highbury? more dubai than london.
I’m so glad – perhaps even honored – to have had the experience of reading this.
“Reaching the semi-finals of the Champions League, there’s never a question of being a victim,” Guardiola continued. “This club knows how to lose because it has lost a lot more than it has won.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/competitions/champions-league/7650058/Barcelona-v-Inter-Milan-Pep-Guardiola-apologises-to-fans-for-not-reaching-final.html
I loved this. Thank you for writing it.
Great piece for sure.
I wonder what this would mean for our beloved N Hornby? He seems to argue – or at least, suggest – repeatedly that being a fan of Arsenal, and perhaps sport(s) more broadly, is not an escape in the way that outsiders, as it were, think it is (and condemn it for being – childish, puerile, and the like). Rather, it is a magnifier of sorts, something that interacts with very real-life events to produce at times an explosive dialectic (or a very effective, soft cushion). For me this is a quite accurate picture of obsessive, if not sort of right and correct, fandom. The piece above suggests that one kind of fandom is better than another, and as such, it will save your life. This right kind is more or less the escapist kind, the ‘mostly just for fun’ kind, which I’m not sure could ever have much purchase with the figurative (or actual) ultras. Perhaps this is a weakness of it, despite its eloquent elaboration.
But as a plea, it is eloquent. Well done, B Phillips. And keep up the great work in Slate as well.
You write wonderfully and of wonderful truths. The incentive for partisanship comes from the fundamental that loss hurts more than gains reward; to be on one extreme minimizes that pain while also giving one the maximum possible claim to pleasure should that extreme claim victory.
Froody.
Tremendous, tremendous piece. The Barca-Real fixture took this whole syndrome into darker realms than I’d ever thought possible.
I think the concept of hyperpartisanship is extremely interesting, but I also wonder whether such bitterness and blinkered views are created only through perceived adversity, or if there is something more ingrained in the psyche of certain ‘top’ managers and fans.
As you allude to, with managers such as Mourinho, Wenger and Ferguson, there always seems to be a sense of irrational injustice bubbling under the surface waiting to erupt, but with the fans of these teams, despite the comparitive success many have witnessed at their clubs, the memories of red cards and disallowed goals are always hiding just behind the memory of the last trophy.
Perhaps success breeds contempt in that sense, that given their so recent victorious nature, how could anything possibly go wrong… unless the Soccer Gods and their ministers on this terrestrial plain are conspiring to cause them to fail.
@Nicklas Bendtner That’s well put, but it’s a huge simplification to say that I’m arguing for light escapism as opposed to the intense engagement of Nick Hornby. I think that the point of sports is pleasure—it has to add something to your life rather than take something away—but within that mandate there’s scope for all sorts of vast and tragic and painful and ecstatic feelings. In the same way, to look at another Hornby pastime, the purpose of music is pleasure, but music can leave you feeling shattered.
I’m not telling you not to be shattered; I’m telling you not to turn into the kind of “music-lover” who spends most of his time seething about a sentence in a Pitchfork review. The game shouldn’t leave you bitter or paranoid, and there’s a massive difference between succumbing to bitterness and treating the game as a magnifier for your real life.
@Rich Pye Isn’t what we’re seeing in football just an unfortunate but quite predictable bleed-over from the polarisation of society in general over the last decade or two?[1] Aren’t the traits and dynamics of hyperpartisanship in football pretty much indistinguishable from those of the red-state/blue-state, pro-life/pro-choice, evolution/intelligent-design, free-market/anti-globalisation tandems? Isn’t Mourinho just Ann Coulter with better hair?
In this digital age, everything seems to be either a one or a zero; no in-betweens are admissible. [2]
_____________
1. Any ideas what event might have triggered the polarisation we now see – Whitewater/Lewinski, maybe?
2. I was sorely tempted to let rip with a yin Barça/Pep/UNICEF versus yang Real Madrid/Mou/BWin riff here, but sanity prevailed and I held off.
@Nicklas Bendtner You make a good point, but I think the problem with the Hornby example is that he came through it organically as the way soccer culture in his community worked at that time. Too many of the asshats that Brian describes in this piece (focusing on the US market here) are merely acting the way they do because they read Hornby or watched someone else and think that’s the way you have to be in order to be a soccer fan.
@Brian BINGO!
So many fans here playing a role. It’s like in that soccer bar on Saturday mornings, all of a sudden reporters are “journos” and for some reason they only acceptable way to insult somebody is to call them a “c**t.” Once that last FSC game of the day ends, suddenly you don’t hear any of those terms any more.
Obviously, it’s more than just the way people talk, but I’d require a few thousand words to get into the whole bit. You couldn’t have summarized it any better, Brian.
Always great reading. Articles such as these are one of the great off-field pleasures of football and reiterate your point nicely. It should add to, not diminish your experiences.
Simply outstanding.
This is beautifully written, but in the end something bothers me about it. Irrationality and delusion are dangerous in government or in the workplace, but where can we be irrational and deluded if not in or around a game? The derangement is interesting in itself–it is part of the game and not an external force souring it. As Dostoevsky writes of hypothetical perfectly rational human behavior:
Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: ‘I say, gentleman, hadn’t we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!’ That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers—such is the nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated.
And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one POSITIVELY OUGHT (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very ‘most advantageous advantage’ which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
Brilliant post, as always. This is the gold standard of blog-post writing.
@Brian Phillips To defend the idiots momentarily: I think this invocation of “pleasure” (whether by you or by Hornby) is ultimately a distraction. Sports – like music or art or literature – do not exist to provide pleasure. That is not their function. The pleasure one derives from viewing a painting, reading a poem, or watching a match is a secondary benefit. Certainly the creation of culture bears no relation to pleasure (hence the idea of the “tortured artist” and the continued employment of The Special One). Culture, including sport, exists to make meaning. It exists to help us understand something about ourselves. Even if you do not subscribe to ideas of sport as escapism, the appeal to “pleasure” signals a desire to lessen the stakes, to say, as you do in the post, that other things are more worthy of your hyper-dedication. I guess I’m not willing to concede that the meaning we take from sport is of secondary importance to the pleasure (and the full range of emotions under that umbrella term) it provides. From this perspective, the stakes are actually rather high. Hence, who wins matters a great deal to me as a fan, not just out of tribal attachment to club or country, but because the outcome says something significant about the time, place, and culture in which it unfolds. It helps me make meaning out of the world around me. And I would very much like certain things to be true about that world, just as I would very much like my side to win. Stoically accepting both realities as they are does nothing to obliterate my desires.
In this light, the real substance of your critique targets the fomenters of hyperpartisanship, namely Wenger, Mourinho, Fergie, et al. It seems to me not incidental that the loudest complaints about sleights and conspiracies both perceived and imagined come from those who have already most greatly benefited from the system they purport to find unjust in certain convenient moments. That we’re in the CL semis is a testament to our quality, they say; that we lost signifies a flaw in the system. This view is not the product of excessive partisanship but of a particularly loathsome strain of self-regard in which one’s rightly earned elevated status is thought to inure oneself from failure or criticism (see also: Wall Street). To me, then, the spinning of conspiracies by these asshats is much more insidious than the partisans who believe them.
And that is why Dalglish telling off Wenger is one of my favorite things ever.
thank you
@Ontology Very well said. I don’t disagree with you except to the extent that you see “pleasure” as something distinct from “meaning” in the game, and to me, they’re hard to separate—our Victorian grandparents didn’t flock to the terraces to see culture struggling to be born, they flocked because they liked the game, whether because it was thrilling or because it told them something about themselves or both. I’d say that much of the archive of this site could be read as a (maybe even excessive!) defense of looking to sport for the kind of meaning you’re describing. You’re misreading the piece, or I screwed up writing it, if you think I’m telling you not to care who wins matches. I intended this as a warning against a much narrower sort of thwarted hostility.
Your point about the beneficiaries of the system being the loudest voices of protest against it is exactly right, and probably a topic that warrants its own post.
Fantastic post. Everything a post should be.
@Tonyto It sounds like such a fan-boy thing to say, but Dalglish just seems like a window into a bygone era. He seems genuinely confused by comments like Wenger’s. “How should I, or anyone else, be responsible for an accidental foul in the penalty box? The player made a mistake and the referee called the foul. I… I don’t understand!”
@AR – - Way to completely miss the point.
…my Chelsea scabbard is not to be fucked with.
No, I kid, I kid; I don’t even support Chelsea.
Regardless, a beautifully written article. I can’t speak as much for the older generations, but I know this is exceptionally prominent in younger fans. Articles like this are why I read Run of Play.
Look at what sport produces; because this post is not just about football. As many here have said, the writing found here can be applied to many facets of life. It took me two days to digest what Mr. Phillips wrote here, and the only reaction I can muster is that of awe, and humility before sport. Sport does give pleasure, and it does carry meaning. As Brian commented above- “they’re hard to separate”. How could you derive pleasure (joy, dissapointment, euphoria, despair) from something and then turn around and tell me that something carries no weight, has no meaning? It has to. It always has. Now, how to illustrate that meaning, how to make people understand it? We’ll have to leave that up to people like the good Mr. Phillips, because I sure as hell can’t do it. But I know it’s there, and I know it exists. This is why I wake up at 4:30 AM Saturdays and Sundays. Because while everyone else sleeps, I am witness to something that I know (don’t ask me how) will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Personally i think this argument applies more to those who play the game than watch the game.
There are far too few people who play the game competitively for pure enjoyment
@clemantona I hadn’t thought of this. I have played religously, every Sunday, for the past 4 years. The things I see, and the things I hear from other players at SUNDAY LEAGUE games would make you think they were fighting relegation or trying to qualify for the Champions League.
I was doing fine until you mentioned Øvrebø and the rage just bubbled back up …
Great article though, and I think the comparison to politics is incredibly timely, especially for Americans reading this. We’ve all divided into camps for hundreds of years, but now these camps have their own TV networks and political blogs to tell you what to think. I’d love to see someone in that arena draw on this piece for inspiration and help bring people back off the cliff.
you soccer people are so precious
kumbaya and whatnot
This is true, except in the case where there actually is a conspiracy going on. Such as my league team. The universe is undeniably against us, I’m sure of it.
Well done, Brian. Excellent piece.
One strange place I’ve noticed this is with fans of my new (and newly adopted) club–the club itself is only 1 year old, and it simply does not have enough history to have any real rivalries. At the same time, many of its “hard-core” supporters repeatedly express hatred and disdain for another club, as if hating another club somehow legitimates and authenticates their own club, and their own fandom. It’s bizarre on the face of it, and also when you think about it, the most *inauthentic* stance one could take!
Also I need to remember this post next time I start to complain about NBA refs.
Great piece. This line, “a thing that only exists to give you joy” is what I was looking for as I read this. Said another way, sport exists for fun and to bring happiness, to test the human limits and spur on competition. The misappropriation of sport and misunderstanding of it reveals a something closer akin to cynicism, which the world is awash in.
Amazing post. Thanks a lot for this. seriously, no sarcasm here
Great article.
<3
Mate, this is a fantastic article. Bravo sir
I think every football fan needs a dose of this. Twitter can be so toxic at times, just recently we’ve had stoke fans raging against gooners regarding an issue that happened a year ago (re:ramsey’s injury). There’s also the team rivalry issues where some fans take it too far. I’m a gooner but i don’t really hate tottenham, except when we’re playing against them. lol. My point is, football fans need to take a step back from all the fanaticism because too much can be toxic.
The article was one of the best i’ve read so far, thank you.
Ah, yet still the ill-informed comments on youtube and yahoo answers continue.
I think that the increased honest writing and analysis of soccer on the internet and in periodicals has made me and others better fans, still there are some who regard such introspection in the game as dangerous. I’ve had moments when if I slip a slight talk of tactics or player history I get a baleful look or sneer from others. They act as if soccer talk should only extend to discussing why your favorite team is the “f%*&ing salt of the earth”.
I’m not sure if the negativity towards objective analysis has increased with the explosion of honest writing about soccer. I’m not sure if it is because some people feel that sports and soccer should remain a grounds where men may release all of their irrational passion, instead of enjoying and learning through the experience of being fan.
I think the rising phenomenon is hard to classify and characterize because, as you said, people are unwilling to be frank as to the reason they feel such strong rage and frustration. Still you find certain pundits and writers (some of Alexander Netherton’s first work comes to mind) who act almost against this rising movement of thoughtful reflection on the game. Perhaps they believe thoughtful reflection would remove passion from the game, or worse: prove them wrong.
Mike J. My lifelong friend, and I are both Spurs fans, but for precisely the reasons described here, I can’t watch or discuss with him. : / forty years worth of angst and uncontrollable anger. He just can’t enjoy the game unless we win! With a controversial goal adding to his sense of fair play for ‘The Mighty Yids’. I have a feeling these blinkered views exist for all other walks of life. Racism sexism bikes on pavement politrix. The full gamut.
@Brian Phillips I couldn’t disagree more. Without caring, and I mean really caring who wins, watching soccer becomes just like watching American football or cricket or figure skating or baseball or some other game foreigners like to watch. Sure, I can recognize the great skill it must take to make that pirouette or hit that ball with that bat, but if I couldn’t care less who wins, there’s just something missing.
I tend to follow Champions league games while doing something else, if I follow them at all. It’s just a bit of passing the ball around in the midfield these days, yawn. Occasionally it’s fun to watch some players who used to play for my local team play well for some rich foreign club, but then again, some other former players of my local team are playing for their opponent, and I don’t care who wins. None of this comes close to watching my local team almost not lose. They represent me, my city, maybe a boyhood fantasy of being one of them.
In short, I don’t understand a soccer fan like you. Fans who support a team on another continent they have absolutely no ties with, but then flit to another team some time later, and then another, always supporting the one that happens to be the most likely winner at the time.
If you take the emotional involvement away, well it’s a fairly simple game isn’t it. Fairly similar and predictable, the richest ones ends up near the top, the poorest ones in the relegation zone.
@Boo That’s awesome, except that this piece doesn’t say that you shouldn’t care who wins, or make literally any of the other arguments you impute to it.
@Brian Phillips Come on, Brian. Isn’t it obvious that the only choices we have are (a) to be completely indifferent to the outcome of matches or (b) to be angry, hostile, suspicious, resentful, and bitter? Choose.
There is reality? There is the thing in itself?
Anyway.
very well written…though i think it has a lot to do with the feeling of helpless-ness…fans don’t have a direct control over picking players,teams,formations or how the game is played, we are all passive, so if it doesn’t go against us, our frustrations have to have an outlet, and hence its other fans or random rants. Its a very obvious human reaction as far as i am concerned as everyone needs to vent.lots of times i act the same way, and i will turn to writing something to ‘get it out of my system’.
Well the whining of Mourinho et al., is a pathetic attempt to diffuse responsibility away from themselves and their players/decision/tactics etc.
I understand why no American could ever get really excited about a game of football. When I lived in the USA I attended basketball, American football and baseball games. The crowds are all quite polite etc., by the standards of European football. People need to understand the nature of ‘morbo’.
Loving you own team is not enough; one must also hate others in a kind of performative dialetic. It’s what makes football fun, otherwise it is often just two teams kicking a ball about, in 99%of cases pretty poorly. Football truly requires a larger libidinal economy, than simply the narrowly defined game, to give it spice. As a Rangers and Scotland fan I love to see Celtic and England fail. It never stops being joyful.
So fuck ‘being fair-minded’ and leave all that bourgeois rationalism behind instead let’s be petty and bitter and joyful all at once
Oh and come on Chelsea humiliate Baconface and his crappy team.
This did not help me. I am Artur Boruc mad right now.
@Dr Graham Lister That was the point I tried to make. Without the (hyper) partizanship, why even bother? Along with winning, the rage at getting robbed, even trash talking like Mourhino does; these are the little meat balls in the soup of soccer.
Aargh, my stupid rage is rising, what do i do?
What do I DO?!
I tried to read it, and i found that it’s a little difficult for me to understand it.
@Brian Phillips It’s true that the escapism interpretation is a simplification, but I do think your argument tends more in that direction than towards, in this configuration, Hornby’s. In fact, if I read your comment correctly, it seems you’re suggesting that if we grant that there are more or less two types of fans – the one who is shattered by Pitchfork and the one who laughs at their bobo steez, let’s say – then the latter type affords a greater range of emotion, which actually includes both pleasure and pain. At this point it’s not terribly important (not that it ever was – though I appreciate how active you are in the comments section), but I think my response would be (is) that the range of emotion takes place between those two fan typologies, rather than within one of them. It’s not what you’re saying, I know. But I wonder if it might be more accurate – not to mention it sidesteps the specter of a binary typology, which with all the dimestore postmodernism hereabouts (admittedly, I love it), is surely not desirable. Incidentally, Gang Gang Dance at 8.5? At least an 8.6!
@Brian Phillips Sorry for my odd timezone and multi-post lunch-break check-ins – just wanted to note that the ghost of Susan Sontag is smiling somewhere. Pleasure and meaning, very much unopposed: ‘In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.’ Ah freshman year.
But doesn’t the first rule of persecuted fandom make all this seem a bit silly?
By what metric are you gauging this ‘increase in paranoid rage?’ Wait, is that what you’re discussing? It’s hard to tell. In any case, by any measure, violence in stands has decreased. So there’s that. Just because people have more (and more ubiquitous) forums with which to express it doesn’t mean it is suddenly an epidemic.
I like the way your piece makes makes a call for ‘common sense’ and searching for the middle-ground. We in the Netherlands have(had, due to populism) something called ‘poldermodel” meaning always look for the way you and your opponent can get the best deal out of something without hurting each other. Football needs that. Emotions based on mutual respect and enjoyment of the game instead of hyperpartisanship.
Fakesigi doesn’t like you, Brian: https://soccer.fakesigi.com/why_i_dont_like_run_of_play.html
…
“In a pompous, bloated post titled ‘Your Stupid Rage,’ Phillips starts by earnestly stating that he’s here to save my life. What follows are 2000 words which could be summarized into “Don’t take soccer too seriously.”
…
Bah, Herman Melville, the Yngwie Malmsteen of literature! In a pompous, bloated book titled ‘Moby Dick’, Melville starts by earnestly stating: “Call me Ishmael.” What follows are 300,000 words which could be summarised into “Your obsessions will destroy you.”
@Barry When you put “increase in paranoid rage” in quotation marks, who are you quoting? You’re not quoting Brian, though you seem to want us to think you are.
Note that he doesn’t say anywhere in his essay that soccer rage is getting worse. In fact, he says “people who complain about rage in sports tend to want to mourn some lost standard of politeness, which has nothing to do with anything.” The second sentence of the whole essay says “This isn’t about the state of discourse on the internet, or nostalgia for some imaginary pastoral of 1950s civility.” It’s possible to think that we have a problem now without thinking that our problems are worse than any problems in the history of the world, or even worse than the problems of thirty years ago.
It’s a bit sad that most of the people claiming to disagree with Brian here are disagreeing with things he never said — e.g., that you shouldn’t care about your team, when he says quite explicitly that “You can be a crazy tattooed ultra and still be fine.” Now, that’s in the last sentence of the essay, which is longish by blog standards, so maybe I shouldn’t expect anyone to make it that far. But you probably ought to make it to the second sentence without passing judgment.
(Not that all the disagreements here based on misunderstanding. At least a couple of commenters know what Brian is saying but just like hating and plan to keep on hating. And that’s good to know, I guess.)
P.S. That’s good to know because — well, you understand.
@Alan Jacobs In fairness, I did say that the rage-tap is getting harder to turn off for some people. And I do think that’s true, although as Barry obviously knows, there’s no metric that proves it. It might be that the internet just gives paranoid rage a megaphone.
But then it’s not as if the historical precedent really matters here. If people in the ’40s were angry hyperpartisans, they should have stopped, too.
@Brian Phillips That’s the last time I try to defend you, ingrate. “I was not angry since I came to RoP / Until this instant.”
@Alan Jacobs You might appreciate this T-shirt:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v18/rjamesg/IMG_4255.jpg
I really like this, why, because i live with a guy who is exactly the hyper-ist of hyperpartisans, i literally cannot talk to the guy about football, it’s a shame and more people should come around to the idea of “your team isn’t perfect and nor is mine, lets have a beverage…”
@Alan Jacobs First, Alan, I enjoy the irony of you flaming me while telling me I missed the point of an article that, as far as I can understand, is telling people not to flame each other. That was the point you were trying to make, right? Or that Brian was? I do beg your forgiveness, it is a little confusing for me. No, not because I’m stupid, or don’t know how to read, but because this article lacks what we call a ‘thesis’ and also any evidence to support his point of any kind (I should note here, in the interest of quelling Brian’s rage, that I normally enjoy your words.
@Barry I don’t think I was flaming you, I just wanted to point out that your quotation wasn’t a quotation, before anyone else reading assumed that Brian had said what you attribute to him. There’s a difference between correction of factual errors and flaming. At least I hope there is!
Late to the party – but I tried writing something similar (only in conception) earlier this spring based on the Cubs and how they’ve all but destroyed my love for baseball. Obviously, it’s not in the same stratosphere as this. You continue to amaze. Awesome piece. Thank you.
SO TRUE. AND SO FABULOUSLY SAID.
TY. I was forwarded this by a friend in my office (Hi Andy) and this hyperpartisanship is exactly why I hated football from about the age of 10.
I’ll be honest I still dislike the game (No I don’t I dislike the hyperpartisanship but to me the two are so closely linked it’s hard to seperate them) and I’m not likely to run off and get a seassion ticket but at least I know their are decent *football* fans out their.
Sure, the message might be not to over do it. But the best things in life are mixtures of little bits of love, a little bits of rage. And if it doesn’t involve either emotions, could you say you’re really engaged with it?
This pretty much sums up my relationship with AC Milan and a few other teams I support, specifically Mark Webber in Formula One.
‘“Here comes Crazy Forum-Poster Rafa,” I used to think during Benítez’s wilder press conferences.’
Which ones were they? The ones where he spoke about character or the ones where he spoke about mentality?
Oh, you mean the “rant” that wasn’t a rant? The calmest rant ever, which let the world know that having a preemptive dig at Fergie before he starts the mind games on you, his closest rival that season, really upsets a Liverpool dressing room. Because Carra cares for Fergie’s feelings, am I right? Shut up, Rafa. You cost us games with your mean-spirited anti-Fergieness.
Then there was that “beyond the pale” comment. Not a rant. Not a peep of a hint of a suggestion it was a rant from the journos. Certainly not likely to unsettle a Utd dressing room. A 4-1 humping at home was because of…erm…er…ker-razy Rafa! Or something.
Anyway, the only thing worse than hyperpartisanship is over-intellectualising of a simple game for simple folk.
The points your raise are true but also so blindingly obvious that it just sad that in these times, people like your good self, have to take the time and trouble to say them…
@john ….it’s ok john, ED sometimes happens to the best of us….but on the brightside….you can take pills for it.
This is pretty awesome.
“You can be a crazy tattooed ultra and still be fine…You just can’t be an idiot”
You make a good point. But there are certain Dirty Scum that I will always love to call Dirty Scum.
Does this mean it’s okay for me to admit that, as a Barca fan, I hate the play-acting of Busquets, Pedro, and Alves more than almost anything else in all of soccer? They are too good for that crap. Whew, that felt good to let out. Great article.
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I wouldn’t say you have saved my life