By the way, while it’ll be interesting to see how City fare this year, and the derbies should be barn-burners, I trust it’s lost on no one the irony that proud working-class City fans are now cheering for the richest club in the world - least of all the fans themselves.

** I think, given the time frame, ‘Quentin’ would have been short for Quentin Crisp, aka the Naked Civil Servant, a flamingly open homosexual governmental aide, about whom a TV drama had recently aired. Brit schoolboy insults largely revolved around homosexuality, perhaps because many boys didn’t go to school with any girls at all.

I have always supported Man Utd as my mom and her family hail from Alderley Edge, where traditionally a lot of the players live (yes, it’s posh). For 29 years now; many of the early ones without a glimmer of silverware, so like you, the ‘glory hunter’ tag irks me, but it’s easily shrugged off with a grin and a nod towards the trophy cabinet…. http://tinyurl.com/pb8vuv

Awesome post, man!  I begrudge no one their fandom.  No matter your team, even the big-winning Chelsea and Man U of the last several years, have suffered stinging defeats (like in Champs finals/semis last seson).  And I’m a big believer in the pain of losing making you a fan.  I switched from light dabbler to hardcore fan only very recently, when Chelsea shanked Liverpool in the Champs quarterfinals.  I spent so much time dwelling on how badly Liverpool got pounded in the first leg, and how much that bothered me, that I realized I wasn’t just a casual observer.  I was invested.  And when I get invested, I do shit like start a blog, so there you go.

I think, given the time frame, ‘Quentin’ would have been short for Quentin Crisp

Well, I will be utterly damned. I remember being given the “synthesis of queer and bent” line in part because I’d never even heard the word “bent” used as a slur; it was like a double whammy of homophobia.

Excuse me while I roll my eyes. Yet another Manc fan who couldn’t give you directions from Manchester Victoria to OT. Like most of the rest.

Is there an honest fan here who is not supporting a top four side?

I’m sick of bloody glory hunters!

Fuck you, Lee. Why would I want to know how to get there from Victoria? I came into the city at Piccadilly, which is practically walking distance from Old Trafford.

(Of course, so is Victoria, I suppose, although I’ve never been there.)

Okay, one more comment and then I promise I’ll stop flooding this comments section. In 1990, United finished five points above relegated Sheffield Wednesday. Two more losses (or draws to Wednesday and Luton Town) and they’d have been down to the second division. I don’t remember that in detail, I looked it up, but I *do* remember learning about relegation the hard way as United drew and lost several important matches between January and April.

And the thing is, I don’t intend to begrudge anyone their now-Big-Four supportership, not by a long shot. There’s not anything wrong with learning to enjoy a new sport by watching a team play skillful football - not just winning, but skillful. That’s something I wouldn’t have gotten by watching then-Fourth Division-Stockport County, my most-local side. But accusations of bandwagon-jumping bother me even more when they’re complete bullshit.

I’m with you Auguste, and I really don’t know WTF Lee is on about - you can’t be an “honest fan” if you support one of the Top Four? So…..all of their fans are bandwagon-hopping shitheads? Even those who have been fans for decades? Interesting theory!

Stupid, but interesting in its stupidity.

To me, if you hang on with your team through whatever, through the crap times, then you’re an honest fan. Fucking hell, I’ve been a Newcastle supporter as long as I’ve been a soccer fan, and relegation hurts like a bitch but I’m not about to drop them over it. I do hope they sort their shit out soon, though, otherwise I would like to give a few people over there a smack in the mouth. But while wearing my scarf

Really, Lee, what are you expecting?

Someone coming in from outside, with no home or family ties to any particular place ... why on earth would they support Blackburn?  Hell, people who are from Blackburn don’t support Blackburn!

These are teams who start every season in the hope that, if everything goes right ... and they catch a couple of breaks ... and the team doesn’t come down with food poisoning the night before the last game* ... they could finish FOURTH!!1!  What’s the point?

*—this actually happened

Bandwagon-jumping (hopping) is such an awkward term. Bwumping? That’s just as bad if not worse. Bandwagoning isn’t bad. But more to the point…

I remember moving to Prague a few summers ago already a huge footy fan (albeit starved for quality matches in the US) and having to pick a team to support for the upcoming campaign. There were sociopolitical ramifications up the wazoo, let me tell you. And, while I wasn’t the rosy-cheeked young schoolboy you were when you had to pick allegiances I didn’t exactly have the grounding in recent Czech sporting history to appreciate the significance of supporting Sparta Praha. Nice colors, I thought, red and white. Champion’s League qualifiers, too.

It wasn’t unlike supporting United. That is, if United had been a club historically supported by a widely loathed Soviet puppet government and wont to taunt its rival with chants of “Jude Slavia” (Jewish Slavia) in reference to Slavia’s perceived past as the preferred club of dissident intellectuals. So… ending up supporting the Republic of Mancunia ain’t the worst fate for a young boy. At least you’re not a Spurs fan.

Okay, sorry, but the football team is “S“eltic, not “K“eltic. The Hoops are my team. I tried to adopt an EPL team, too, but I could never get that attachment like with Celtic, and I seem to have a curse for EPL teams—the first one I tried was Leeds (need I say more), then Newcastle, and sometimes Blackburn Rovers. Lately I’ve been leaning towards Aston Villa, because of Martin O’Neill and the Americans, but I don’t want to damage them, too. And since I gave up my cable TV, I haven’t been watching much of anything; I have to live with the reports online.

And (sorry), I HATE Manchester United! (I’ve tried to love City, but I’m still working on it.)

You’re right, leppojoove, obviously. I swear to god I know that, but somehow while writing this that popped in my head. I must have just been focused on the Celtics/Celtic difference and…I don’t know, that’s just weird.

*EMBARRASSED*

Fuck you, Lee.

And likewise. With a chainsaw.

Accusations of bandwagon-jumping bother me even more when they’re complete bullshit.

Except it’s not entirely bull, isn’t it? It IS a bandwagon.

You can slice it any way you want, Auguste, but the big four fanbase exists because the success begets further exposure begets media promotion begets earnings begets success. The Big Four have become a black hole Hoovering up cash and support.

You may be nodding and going ‘so fucking what?’ but to a native fan this is still a distressingly novel phenomenon. The old football league was pleasingly volatile. Any sustained success, such as Liverpool’s in the ‘70 and ‘80s was notable precisely because of the difficulty of the achievement.

Now we have become like the continental leagues we used to despise, with a championship fought over by a handful of wealthy sides and with everyone else occupying a second tier. In the case of the Prem these winners were the sides most fortuitously placed for success in the early ‘90s when the league was formed and begun to funnel vast sums of cash into the system. The exception was Chelscum who were virtual bankrupts at the hands of Ken Bates until a Russian Oligarch ascended from Hades with a near-endless supply of stolen money that other pretenders, such as Leeds, did not have. In a manner that is unprecedented, even in those rotten days of smoky backroom director’s deals, the top tier of British football has generated a self-sustaining elite.

I do not think this is a good thing, either for the sport or for the competition. To this fan the whole rotten edifice has become a structure designed to shovel bodies of new fans into the maw that is the Big Four marketing machine. You can limply bat around excuses such as ‘fans like me will follow the most skillful play’ but I ain’t fucking buying it. Yank fans follow the teams that get most exposure on TV. And the most exposed teams are Big Four teams, aren’t they?

As I say, it looks like a bandwagon to me. And you look like a gang of smug glory-hounds. Skillful football, my arse! You should listen to your Roy Keane, who had a few well-chosen words to say about the prawn sandwich brigade.

When I say ‘give me the honest supporter’ I mean it. A Toon supporter cannot be anything other than an honest fan, shackled to his team by passion and pride and history. Same goes for a Spurs fan, a Wham fan and especially a Citeh fan. There’s nothing plastic about Wolves or Pompey or Stoke fans. They are the ones who have clung on through the thick and mostly thin. And they don’t fucking eat prawn sandwiches like a bunch of swanky Manc scum.

A pox on all you glory-hunters!

Oh, and for anyone accusing me of being a cranky and out-of-touch old git whining on about money corrupting the sport, TOO FUCKING RIGHT I AM! I have been following footy since the sixties and have an absolute right to be a bitter old geezer with a heart full of hate for the money men and contempt for the new breed of ersatz fans lured in by the overexposure of the Big Four. They are ‘plastics’ with no history. Should the self-sustaining machine, God forbid, be unable to keep a Big Four side aloft on a cloud of readies, the passion of the plastics will melt like a snowman in a sauna.

A pox on all of ‘em! Every man jack of ‘em!

And (sorry), I HATE Manchester United!

Nothing to be sorry about. It is the proper response of all right-thinking fans.

Well, Lee, I’m sorry you feel that way.  This isn’t the blog for you.  We’re here to be a friendly, inclusive hangout, and you are here to impede that.  Best of luck out there.

It’s funny, actually, because I just today got back in touch with the Spurs fan I mentioned in the post, above - a Spurs fan not, if I recall, born in London, by the way, but one who had become a fan because at a formative age he had watched the 1984 UEFA cup win - and the first thing he asked me about was the Portland Trail Blazers’ younger players. Apparently not everyone is upset by the idea of non-local, international support for local sports.

But hell, I just found out that Cheadle Town, an even more local side to where I was living, “are famous throughout non-league football for their foreign tours and has a record of playing 96 games in 30 different countries in front of 312,000 people, scoring 111 goals in the process”...“Despite being near the bottom of the football pyramid.” It’s too bad my 14-year-old self wasn’t prescient enough to pledge my full loyalty to a club in North West Counties Division 2.

Auguste, I won’t try to call you a glory hunter or whatever, the fact is you were in Manchester and even if they weren’t your local team as such, you’re still perfectly entitled. To anyone else new to the sport and without a local or family affiliation to rely on, I’d urge you to pick someone lower down the food chain to support, if for no other reason than it’ll make you infinitely more interesting.

(Full disclosure: I also started following the game from a foreign country and I’m a Liverpool fan, although in my case I was five years old and they were the team my dad supported)

Actually, SKoF, Lee’s baiting got me a little worked up, but I agree with you to an extent. Supporting a less-than-big-four club can be more rewarding, which obviously I don’t know firsthand except that I’m a more-lukewarm fan of 1860 Munich, for other youthful reasons, but it’s less live-and-die.

I mean, dead seriously and apart from the local opportunity, I really, honestly thought I was “picking someone lower down on the food chain.” Was quite surprised when I found out otherwise.