Football insults your intelligence. While that is the truth, it is not the whole truth. Football doesn’t just insult your intelligence, it also emotionally cripples you, screws up your social relationships and causes you enough misery that it is frankly amazing that people still care about the damned game!
Shocked? Don’t be. Let us start with the single most stupidest thing about being a football fan. Your happiness is not yours to control. Atleast once a week, more often twice, eleven players thousands of miles away decide whether you will spend the next few days ridiculously happy or depressingly sad. How flipping ridiculous is that!! I speak from personal experience how horrible it can get. Had a really tough viva the next day and stubbornly decided to still stay up late and watch my club’s match. I support Real Madrid and it was the first leg of the UCL Semi-Final. We all know how that worked out. Honestly don’t know how I passed that particular viva.
That match also typifies the mad optimism that grips most football fan. We have been battered 4-1 away from home and the only thing I was fixating on was the ONE. That away goal got my hopes up so badly it is not even funny. It did nearly work out in the end at Bernabeu but alas Madrid went out at the semi-finals for the third straight year. You become a football fan you almost automatically get a really insane sense of optimism. Not the good kind mind you, more of “Oh we are 9 points behind but we can turn it around and win!” which sadly never really works out.
“Oh I am sorry, I have to leave early. There’s a match I have to watch.” Is a line everyone uses. If you are lucky, the person is a football fan and he gets it. Otherwise you get the whole “what is wrong with you” face thrown at you. This is another problem with being a committed football fan. Social life is secondary to the game. Weddings, birthdays, anniversaries are all secondary to the glorious game! Does not matter if it is a derby game or taking on the bottom team, each has to be seen for some stupid reason I can’t even remember.
While all of the above reasons can be understood by the rest of the world if they have even a shred of empathy, there is the big problem with years which is beyond the realm of mere mortals. The way we football fans count time is so far removed from the general public it can lead to some incredibly hilarious results. The new year began a few days back, but ask a football fan when 2014 began and he will reply that it began in August 2013!! We measure time not from 1st Jan to 31st December but rather from mid-august to somewhere around may. Oh also the fact that for footballers, a year has only 10 months. June and July obviously don’t count. Sure, if it is an even year (2010, 2012, 2014, etc) we have the EUROs or the World Cups to divert our attentions but even they are not really enough for us.
I can go on about this. There are so many quirks which make being a football fan an odd experience to put it mildly. Being an emotional wreck because your team blew a lead and lost in injury time, the sense of elation when your direct rivals suffer an injury crisis, the feeling of being lost during the mid-week when there is no football, etc. Being a football fan is an intense journey and it is definitely not for the faint hearted and I would advice anyone who is not a fan to stay as far away from this as humanly pos- Oh who am I kidding! Being the football fan is a crazy ride which eventually is completely worth it!
