“I am conscious of the ball, but I am also conscious that I am not the ball. I desire to possess the ball. My project is to become a for-itself-in-itself a synthesis of self and non- self, in other words, God.” – Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

After a prolonged fallow period in my teenage years, I now find myself attending two football matches in the space of a week, for the first time in ten years. Rather than attributing this spell of sporting malaise to any particular choice or disengagement, I see this as a natural progression through the various stages of my maturation.

Our formative years bring about many swings both in mood and purpose, but aimed largely towards one goal, contextualising the self apropos to our concept of the other. In early childhood this takes on a simplistic form, as we begin to explore the basic concepts of what it means to be a unique human being in our environment. It is only at the halfway point through our first decade that we start to conceive ourselves in direct opposition to other people.

To use a much-misquoted phrase, Bill Shankly in 1981 claimed, “Someone said ‘football is more important than life and death to you’ and I said ‘Listen, it’s more important than that’. That the phrase has been trotted out again and again over the past decades does not detract from an important point we can draw from it: that football is no mere pastime, and its juvenile partisanship shares much in common with a religious upbringing.

The football fan is forever shaped by these boundaries placed on them within early years, clearly defining the parameters of ‘us and them’, such that any later life revision of these principles becomes near impossible. For a child who is finding his way in the world, what could be clearer than the primary opposition of reds versus blues, hoops versus stripes, us against the world?

In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre says that, “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.” It is in our formative years that this rejection of being in-itself is most apparent, when each of us has the clearest opportunity to experiment with lifestyle choices without fear of reprisal or failure. As a young child the simplistic allure of following a particular football team is akin to the safety of the homestead or the comfort of a favourite meal, but as a young adult this life pursuit becomes one of binary opposition.

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Sartre once claimed: “In football everything is complicated by the presence of the other team”. This perfectly encapsulates the idea of the football fan not existing conceptually for-itself but only within a realm of intersubjectivity, whereby tension between the same-subject and opposing viewpoint can be fully realized. To complicate an issue means to introduce more than one viewpoint for consideration, and football as the ultimate pastime of ‘us-and-them’ is therefore rooted in this complication. Conversely however, to simplify the subjective on a personal level requires one to understand that there is more than one available view and to actively decide which side one is on; ergo, to define oneself.

When I was nine-years-old, I recall clearly, after moving schools, the interrogation of other pupils as to where my footballing loyalties lay. Upon my disclosure, I could tell that my choice was not a popular one, but that I felt no sense of shame at being ‘the other’, and certainly no embarrassment at my team’s many failings in contrast to my peers’ respective clubs.

It is this, which convinces me that the decision to follow a particular club in most cases is not a decision at all, but a characteristic with which every football fan allows himself to be defined by others. I recall no stage in my upbringing where I had the chance to make the choice, and yet it is a choice which undoubtedly I have and will continue to defend as surely as if I had made it myself.

The decisions one must take to define oneself in teenage years: those concerning fashion, the opposite sex and employment for example, are not akin to this footballing non-decision, in that they must be made entirely of one’s own volition. As such any slight or critique of these decisions must be borne with the accompanying shame at its failure.

Jacques Derrida said, “beyond the Touchline is nothing”, and this perfectly describes the upsurging football fan, whose one defining characteristic is taken boldly and in deference to no one. These later teenage decisions, in contrast, are based entirely on uncertainties, and it is for this reason that the football fan so often sidelines that which is ‘certain’ in order to define the nascent parts of himself.

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The football fan bears the weight upon his shoulders of a decision he did not make, nor will likely ever consider revising. However, we must not confuse the decision to be a fan of a particular club with the decision to be a fan of football itself. While a particular club allegiance is rarely questioned, it is simple to choose to not follow the world of football altogether.

In my life, I fell out of love with football in my early teens, only choosing to return to it as my teenage years were waning, and it is precisely this ‘choice’ which places football fanaticism under its proper scrutiny. While the young football fan is first a fan of his club and secondarily a fan of the game, the reverse is true of the adult who chooses for-itself this life pursuit.

The adult football fan takes on both parts of this decision, the a priori given-definition of himself as a member of a particular football allegiance, and the a posteriori self-definition as one who chooses to validate this decision made in his absence.

The immutability of our first love must be countered so that we can reclaim this bold decision as one of our own, and with it suffer the ups and downs that any important decision should rightly confer upon us.

We must stand up and say that we have both encountered ourselves as a football fan and later defined ourselves equally as such, rather than been content to accept solely the former.

For one cannot be proud of what he did not himself create.

“There are scientists who will tell you that spirit, because it can’t be measured, doesn’t exist. Bollocks. It does exist” - Sam Allardyce

By Germaine Arnold.