Lots of smart, even inspiring, responses and rebuttals to the rage piece. But writing on the internet is like Barry Bonds’s head—the more people talk about it, the more it turns into something else. So I want to take a second to tighten a couple of screws before we let the topic go.
The idea is not “you should care less about [your team] [soccer] [sports].” There’s a difference between caring too much and caring in a way that’s toxic and self-destructive, and the piece was only about the latter. I thought that was pretty clear when I wrote “you can be a crazy tattooed ultra and still be okay” and “you can care about something other than your club and still be totallysupercommitted to your club,” but a few people, even people who liked the piece, still got the idea that I was saying “lighten up.” I don’t think a collective lightening up would be a bad thing, and I don’t think you have to have a favorite club to be a real fan. But at the same time, it’s entirely possible to be this guy without giving yourself a hyperpartisan brainwash. And it’s specifically that bitter, suspicious, hyperpartisan attitude toward the game that I was trying to write about—not raw passion.
“Hyperpartisanship” doesn’t mean fandom. If you’re a fan of a club, you’ve picked a side. If you’re a hyperpartisan, you’ve let the side you picked blot out everything else. You can’t admit that your club is ever wrong, you genuinely think that your opponents (and fans of your opponents) are bad people, you can’t believe your team ever gets a fair shake from referees or the media. That’s not the same thing as caring about, even living and dying over, your side’s wins and losses. It also doesn’t mean that you care more than a different kind of fan. It just means you’ve short-circuited your head to receive, and broadcast, command messages from your own party. And because those messages are usually at least semi-delusional (“Ramsey’s refusal to accept Shawcross’s apology was worse than Shawcross’s tackle” is this month’s “Palin has a surprisingly firm grasp on foreign policy”), you’re constantly running up against contradictions, which feeds your persecution complex, which means you’re always a little pissed off. You’re not engaging with the game so much as angrily trying to shut out everything about the game that threatens you or that you don’t like.
“Joy” doesn’t mean casual entertainment. Any misunderstanding here is on me, because I used the word “fun” a couple of times and didn’t develop the idea that the purpose of soccer is to bring you joy. So let me clarify. I suffer over the game. I look for meaning in the game. I don’t see the game as a series of easy thrills. I was thinking of joy in a very broad, adds-something-huge-to-your-life sense, in the same way that you could say music exists to bring you joy even though music can turn you upside down and throw you against the wall and still be great music. The point is that you’re going to the game because it makes your life richer and better—whether by making you feel something, making you laugh, making you sob, showing you something about yourself, scaring you, or yes, giving you explosions of happiness—and that if it’s making your life smaller and worse, something is wrong. It can, and should, make you angry sometimes. Just not always and not by default.
Read More: rage
by Brian Phillips · May 10, 2011
The city of Newcastle is hyperpartisan.
@Lacedaemonian “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean I’m wrong” might actually apply in Newcastle.
How can you say that we shouldn’t care about the game?
Just joking of course, but so many within the game have anger and paranoia as their default position that it’s starting to seem normal.
I think that the media generate paranoia. Most Newcastle fans I speak to distrust many newspapers and journalists. (Waits for the jokes). They can list journalists and refer to articles they wrote ‘crap’ about their beloved club. Fleet Street appears to enjoy poking the noisy beast that is the northern fan.
Re: Joy and Caring Less. I think that’s right, even though it’s a paradox. The clásicos showed us that more money and higher stakes and dramatic inequality DON’T give us better soccer or more joyful games on the pitch. Eventually the off-field stuff overwhelms the event itself. The match can’t bear the weight.
And that’s the paradox. If things were more equal (says the self-parodying culé), the stakes of these occasional games would be lower, meaning that more games would be competitive, and that more games would be joyful, and so on and so forth. It’s not that we need to care less about the game…we just need to stop burying ALL of our caring in singular, specific moments.
So basically, you’re just saying “don’t be an Internet hooligan.” Which seems self-evident.
@Scott I’m afraid the evidence is on my side on that one.
@Brian Phillips — Oh, I know. I realized my comment came off snarkier than I intented. The downside of online writing! I totally support both these pieces.
But the first rule of persecuted fandom!? dear god
But… the opponents really are bad people; _especially_ the fans! Not just the club, their entire city is an affront to civilization. Just look at them, for Christs sake! You know what they did in 1946?
I still insist that supporting the club of your own town is something entirely different from being a Barcelona fan, simply because they happen to be brilliant and possibly the best the world has seen.
Brian – I would just like to say that I agree with your point, but only in a hyperpartisan manner that wants to yell grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaa every time I read a hyperpartisan post. Grrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaa
This clarifies, yes, but I think I remain unpersuaded. For me, the nugget is this: “If you’re a fan of a club, you’ve picked a side. If you’re a hyperpartisan, you’ve let the side you picked blot out everything else. You can’t admit that your club is ever wrong, you genuinely think that your opponents (and fans of your opponents) are bad people…” That’s a useful distinction descriptively but not too terribly worthwhile when making the kind of argument you are here. What, precisely, is wrong with letting one’s partisanship “blot out everything else”? What’s wrong with having dedication to a club determine one’s experience of the game? Or, for that matter, determine one’s understanding of the surrounding culture? Doesn’t it make as much sense as being guided by anything else? Why should I not suspend (or abandon) reason in favor of whole-hearted dedication to my “party,” as you put it? Is there any indication that fans, ultras, or part-time watchers enjoy the game more in the manner you describe? Are they more complete people because they have not let their side obscure all other ways of making meaning? I guess I’m just not convinced that there is virtue in what others might call “keeping things in perspective.”
The second half of the “nugget” excerpted above is, for me, still more difficult to grapple with. I can admit (begrudgingly) when my team is wrong. However, I do genuinely and sincerely believe that fans of some of my rivals are, in fact, bad people (insofar as they do bad things both related to sport and not). It’s easiest for me to understand this in terms of college athletics since there my tribal allegiances are most firmly rooted. I grew up in the Midwest absolutely loathing the University of Texas. I still do. They were the rival for whom I had the most hatred. And admittedly, part of me still believes their teams, coaches, administrators, and yes, fans, are bad people. I think their approach to collegiate athletics is horrifying. I think the values and practices of the University represent the worst aspects of higher education. I think the fans who wear ten-gallon hats in their $400 seats, who go from ogling cheerleaders in ass-less chaps on Saturday to ‘amen-ing’ the evils of sodomy in the megachurch on Sunday stink of the worst forms of hypocrisy. I would never wish harm on any of them, necessarily. But if teams and the people who organize, lead, and support them represent ideas, I have no problem saying I hate some teams with a rage hotter than white-hot.
So I ask, what is there to gain by me suspending my hatred – a hatred I shouldn’t need to point out is only accessory to sport? People are going to hate one another. What’s wrong with makins sports the signal of one’s allegiances?
I should admit that beliefs about never getting a “fair shake” do strike me as a stupid idea in the ascendancy. However, as I noted on the previous post, that seems to be confined to games involving a select group of elite teams goaded on by managers who should know better. So I suppose to the extent that hyperpartisanship questions the integrity of the game, I’m in agreement that it should be snuffed out. I just think that’s a much more narrowly defined problem.
@Ontology What, precisely, is wrong with letting one’s partisanship “blot out everything else”?
If you’re unpersuaded, fine, but have I not just spent two long posts answering these questions? What’s wrong is that it’s among people whose partisanship has blotted out everything else that bitterness and paranoia toward the game flourishes. And yes, I think that most people who give way to those feelings enjoy the game less. Would you expect prejudicial hatred and a baseless persecution complex to make the experience richer?
@Ontology What, precisely, is wrong with letting one’s partisanship “blot out everything else”?
My answer would be: because then you do stuff like this and, in explanation, appeal to your abiding love for your team.
@Brian Phillips
“Would you expect prejudicial hatred and a baseless persecution complex to make the experience richer?”
Well I am not sure about the persecution complex (I’m not a Celtic fan) but yes prejudicial hatred is what makes football the wonderful carnivalesque pantomime (for adults) that we experience as fans. Viva hate for 90 minutes.
For example, whenever I see Man Utd/England/Celtic etc., playing, I always wish for them to fail and take great joy in it. It’s fun to give vent to such childish emotions because for the rest of the week we all have to be responsible, sensible and quite boring adults. Cartharsis perhaps?
And you really need to get to grips with this whole ‘morbo’ thang. Love and hate are the essential elements of fandom.
Fan attacks Neil Lennon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/may/11/hearts-celtic-match-report.
@Brian Phillips
So an idiot goes and does somthing stupid. I still think it ok to shout abuse at Lennon so long as it remains a ‘performative’ gesture within the confines of the ground. Physical violence is against the law (rightly) – verbal insults – in the context of football should not be. Good grief now to express the idea of ones dislike of the papacy (at a football ground) with the old phrase “Fuck the Pope” is illegal in Scotland – perhaps you are in favour of there being ‘thought-crimes’ like this?
“If you’re a hyperpartisan, you’ve let the side you picked blot out everything else. You can’t admit that your club is ever wrong, you genuinely think that your opponents (and fans of your opponents) are bad people, you can’t believe your team ever gets a fair shake from referees or the media.”
I am extremely ready to admit that Roma are wrong more often than not ; I think it’s childish to complain about referees (why don’t we all just deal with it ?) or media coverage.
However I do believe that Lazio fans are truly evil people.
Does that make me a semi-hyperpartisan ?
There is an interesting corollary to this line of thought in the book Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Essentially, he suggests that there is a causal link between the time scale on which people consume information about their investments (multiple times a day, versus once a day, once a week or once a month) and how happy they are with that investment. According to him the more frequently you check on the object of your obsession (whether it be financial or sporting), the less happy you tend to be, because:
1) sport and financial investing are both extremely noisy (in a statistical sense) undertakings, vulnerable to the fickleness of fate and randomness, and —
2) losses hurt disproportionately worse than gains, making it possible that things can seem horrible while they’re actually going fairly well in the grand scheme of things (See Bendtner’s miss in leg two v. Barca, and the histrionic misery being experienced by hyperpartisan Arsenal fans ever since).
His conclusion finds a similar point to yours: scale back your investment, get perspective, maybe check your financial returns (and your blogs, with apologies, Brian) once a month, not 6 times a day, and you’ll ultimately be a happier person.
The tl;dr conclusion: hyperpartisanship provides nothing more than a greater illusion of control, which can only ever cause greater anger and frustration when the illusion is inevitably shattered.
Great article, Brian.