Football fans lose sight of common bonds as they flee to the extremes

Roughly five years ago, Aaron Ramsey left Stoke City's
Britannia Stadium strapped to a stretcher, his face etched
with pain and his leg broken by a brutal tackle from Ryan
Shawcross. He would not play football again for nine months
but the psychological scarring would last far longer. According
to his own estimations, the Welshman needed three years to
recover his confidence fully.
Ramsey has been back since, of course. On each occasion, he
has been booed by the home fans. When he takes to the field
for Arsenal there this weekend, he will be booed again.
Arsenal, as Shawcross has admitted, are not popular in the
Potteries. "The fans dislike them," said the defender this
week. The antipathy does not stem entirely from the Ramsey
incident, but it was a significant contributory factor. Arsenal
will be booed, too.
To recap: a player and his team are going to play football this
weekend and be jeered by opposition fans because the former
had the temerity to have his leg broken and the latter had the
nerve to be annoyed by it. That is an extraordinary state of
affairs.
Sadly, it is not a desperately surprising one either -- not any
more. Football has always been deeply and viscerally tribal,
but it seems that the rampant corporatisation of the sport over
the past decade or two has been in lock-step with increasingly
virulent division between supporters. It is a curious
phenomenon: as clubs seem to drift ever further away from
their public, that same public clings on to them ever more
desperately.
Thankfully, that does not manifest itself regularly in violence as
it does in other countries -- witness the horrific events in
Argentina this week, where a player was beaten to death by
hooligans from a rival club and a young mother was ambushed
by another group because of the team shirt she wore. A
country so inured to "ultra" attacks almost seemed to shrug in
resignation -- as it did in the 1970s and 80s in Great
Britain.
But the absence of fistfights and knives should not disguise that
there has been a significant cultural shift in what it is to be a
supporter of a football club. It is no longer a case of self-
identifying as what you are -- a Manchester United fan, a
Chelsea supporter, a Tottenham sufferer -- but as what you
are not.
This is mirrored in wider society. Across what used to be
called the "first world" it has been noted by various observers
(like John Cassidy in The New Yorker) that politics has shifted
on its axis from an attempt to assert who we are --
subscribers to a system, believers in an ideology, ruled over by
an "ism," be it capitalism, communism, socialism or whatever
-- to a dialogue of trying to establish what we are not.
What has happened in football is not nearly as serious, of
course, and it is not a perfect parallel. But increasingly, being
a football supporter seems to centre not just on who you cheer
for but who you actively cheer against.
It does not take much, as Ramsey might note, to become an
object of scorn. Not having legs made of iron, perhaps. Or, in
the case of Gonzalo Higuain, who was booed by Arsenal fans
last summer because he had not signed for them, it was enough
that another club had simply offered to pay more money for his
signature.
Look at the glee with which clubs throughout the Premier
League responded to Steven Gerrard's slip against Chelsea
last season, the one which effectively cost Liverpool their first
title in 24 years. It is understandable that Chelsea fans might
revel in it, and Manchester United and Everton supporters,
too, but the priorities of the Arsenal and Spurs fans who have
joined in seem curious at best.
Until, that is, you consider the broader pattern: that who you
hate is now as important as who you love, that you are what
you are only as much as you are what you are not.
Across football, fellow feeling is evaporating. It is antiquated
to yearn for the days when Arsenal fans would go to
Highbury one week and White Hart Lane the next simply for
the pleasure of watching a football match, but it is not so long
since the Merseyside rivalry was regarded as a friendly one.
The vitriol that now permeates relations between Liverpool
and Everton have made that seem a lifetime ago, not a couple
of decades.
There are moments, of course, when this doctrine of hostility
abates. The reaction of Sunderland's supporters to the death of
two Newcastle fans on flight MH17 over the Ukraine was
admirable but at the same time, disappointingly surprising: it
was just a simple human gesture, one which appeared
remarkable because it was so unexpected.
It is a shame that things have gone so far because fans would
be much stronger if they worked together. Supporters of all
clubs have a vast amount of shared interests -- from greater
transparency to more influence on the board and cheaper ticket
prices from a game which they are increasingly locked out of
-- but the consistent refusal to recognise it hampers any
attempt to remedy the situation.
It is a source of considerable amazement to see how much
energy is expended on social media in mocking fans of one club
for behaving like, well, football fans. You see the retweets and
the screengrabs of supporters demanding a certain signing, or
calling for a manager's head, or decreeing that their team is
the greatest team in the world, and then you see the laughter.
What a bunch of idiots, they wink. Aren't they delusional?
Yes, they are, but that is what being a fan is all about. Ramsey
will be booed at Stoke. Arsenal supporters will be outraged by
it. That will simply rile Stoke fans all the more. Put the boot
on the other foot, though, and the reaction would be precisely
the same.
That is the truth of it: supporters have more in common than
they like to think. It is a pity that is lost amid the boos.

Source:ESPN