The guide to being a modern football supporter

Jonny Biscuits

In many ways, you don’t choose your football club, your football club chooses you. It’s the result of a quirk of time, history and geography. How you engage with that club reflects your mind, body and soul. But there’s more that bind us than divides us, as Jonny Biscuits shows, it’s all about finding your tribe.

Welcome to the Championship. The heady heights of The Fourth or Fifth Biggest Division in World Football™.

A successful club with lofty ambitions at this level will inevitably bring a raft of new supporters into the fold.

Some of those new supporters may even be new to football itself. If this is you, then be warned - there are rules to all of this. They are not written down; they change depending on a dizzying array of nebulous factors and they frequently contradict each other. There are rules as old as time itself and there are brand new ones that establish themselves as the game and the world in which we live shift and change around us.

If you are to retain any sense of credibility as a football supporter in the modern world, you need to keep up with all of this and avoid making the kind of mistake that will set you apart as not one of us. Like having a favourite Premier League team as well as supporting Oxford United. Or taking a selfie with Frank Lampard in the background to post on Insta when Coventry City come to town. Or really respecting what Paolo di Canio achieved in his spell at the County Ground.

But fear not - we’re here to help. Through the pages of the Oxblogger Newsletter over the coming months and years, we will help you navigate this baffling world of arcane traditions and rituals and give you the tools you need to establish yourself as a noteworthy supporter.

Welcome to The Guide to Being a Modern Football Supporter.

This is fundamental. It's arguably more important than choosing which team to support. You can devote thousands and thousands of pounds to supporting the club, you can travel far and wide across the country and wave your scarf and can clap and cheer on the team, but you’ll be invisible to your fellow supporters until you’ve given yourself an identity. You can do this by carefully curating a social media presence, or by calling the man on the radio after the match to give your edgy or whimsical personality a chance to shine, or you can do it simply by standing on the terraces and bellowing obscenities.

Or you can do all three, but either way, to make a name for yourself in the cut and thrust of modern football, you need to stand out. Thankfully there’s a wide range of template football supporter personality types that you can choose from to get yourself started:

The hardcore

This is the default supporter type that people aspire to. Most regular fans would probably like to see themselves as part of this circle to some degree, but be warned, dear reader, to do it well requires time, energy and money.

You will have gone to every game, home and away. You’ll have to go the Falklands for a rearranged Tuesday night pre-season friendly having already flown there and back the previous Saturday only for the game to be rained off. You’ll miss your own brother’s wedding because we’ve got Glossop at home in the FA Cup.

You’ll start every conversation with other football supporters, and with the man on the radio, the milkman and the pallbearer at your nana’s funeral by explaining precisely how long you’ve been supporting your club.

The local media outlets and fellow supporters will marvel at your absolute commitment and dedication, even though by every objective definition, it’s an incredibly peculiar thing to do. Your friends and family will mock you for it. They might even berate you.

But at your club’s lowest ebb, you will be the ones keeping the lights on. You are the hardcore, and your club needs you.

You’ll get a silly hat. You’ll adorn your car/house/shed/spouse with memorabilia and merch, whether it be official, bootleg or homemade. You'll name your boat, your dog, your first-born child, or yourself after the football club. You'll be in news stories that fascinate at your eccentricities and devotion; locally at first and nationally if your team gets drawn against someone famous in the FA Cup. You’ll gain identity and fame. Cameras will look for you in the crowd.

But fame is a fickle mistress and who among us can say their closets are sufficiently free of skeletons to stand up to that level of scrutiny?

Rumours will initially begin to circle on social media. Supporters of your own team will warn their children not to speak to you. Eventually, when your star is waning, you'll say or do something problematic in a very public forum and the hushed voices with which people were using to discuss you will grow louder and louder.

Your spouse will leave you. Eventually you’ll find your circle of friends and hangers-on growing thinner and thinner, and at some point, you’ll end up banned from the very terraces upon which you were once a legend.

But you'll have made your mark.

The arguer

Social media will be your stalking ground. You’ll stumble across a debate between two people you don’t know and one of them says how the manager will never achieve anything until he reverts to a flat back four. In a fit of rage you’ll trawl back through fifteen-thousand of that person’s social media posts and several hours later you’ll find the one you were seeking - a post made eight years ago where the same person said they were quite fond of the new wingback the club had signed and isn’t it nice to be playing three at the back these days.

You’ll furiously thrust this under their nose and point out their rank hypocrisy.

Because you’re The Arguer. Everything is tinder for your rage, everywhere you look there are people saying unacceptable things that you absolutely must jump on and take them down several pegs.

Even if people don’t like you, they’ll know who you are, and that’s all that really matters.

The eternal optimist

It’s been a bad day for the football club.

The team is bottom of the league; the manager was arrested for punching an elderly charity worker but hasn’t been sacked; the owners have been indicted for embezzling transfer funds and implicated in the trafficking of orphans in their home country; the team has just lost 6-0 at home to its local rivals; and the roof just fell

off the stadium badly injuring your auntie.

But you’ll still jump onto social media and earnestly post “Maybe not the result we were after today, but there were definitely some positives. Just one or two good results and we could see things swing our way - win or lose up the U’s” Nothing can blunt your boundless enthusiasm and positivity, and no other fan can bear the badge of ‘supporter’ better than you, for that is precisely what you’ll always do.

The drinky-boys

You’ll be exclusively male and aged between 16 and 23. You’ll get the train at 7.30am and immediately get on the beers.

You’ll treat every away game like a stag-do and become so drunk you will rarely remember anything that happened in the match. At least once a season you’ll storm out of the ground in an inebriated fury during the first half because everyone was singing When The U’s Go Steaming In too slowly.

You’ll deride fellow supporters who wear club colours for being conformists and you’ll then dress in exactly the same knock-off designer clothes as your 23 mates (most of whom frighten you) and hundreds of thousands of supporters of other football clubs around the country. Your entire approach to watching football will be a lightweight cosplay of an era of English football that was objectively awful.

But crucially you will be the starting point for most of the atmosphere - very few things will stop you from relentlessly bringing the noise, and despite all the old bastards making sarcastic comments, they’ll secretly be glad you’re there because they just can’t keep it up like that anymore.

The misery-guts

One sure-fire way of showing your utter devotion to the club is by demanding the very best. All of the time. From everybody. You’ll be such a big fan that anything other than utter perfection delivered constantly will receive your utter condemnation and contempt.

If we win 3-0, you’ll point to the chances we missed and that we should have won 6-0. If we win 6-0, you’ll point out that we should be beating teams like that 6-0.

You'll loudly berate players for the occasional misplaced pass, loud enough so they can hear you.

Nobody will understand why you come to the football because it seems to bring you nothing but misery, even at the very brightest moments. But you will. You’ll be there, rain or shine, through thick or thin, supporting the club financially if nothing else. You just might not be happy about it.

The statistician

Your left winger has an aC-xDrib of over 68.113111, the fifteenth highest in a second-tier in October for teams further east than Leamington. Since 1992.

Without you, your fellow supporters would be oblivious to this vital information. You’ll spend endless hours compiling spreadsheets, you’ll drink the Opta Kool-Aid, and you’ll deploy detailed statistical breakdowns to show that yesterday’s match sponsors, Ben’s Bins of Benson, were factually erroneous in awarding Player of the Match to the hattrick-scoring striker because the inverse pivot-back managed 8.3 semi-interceptions per middle-attacking third on the transiting breakdown. You’ll do this hours after everyone has gone to bed and nobody will notice, while earlier in the evening when you were poring over lists of numbers, somebody else received 957 likes with a social media post saying “This guy was rock solid in defensive midfeld today shud of been motm what a ledge!”.

But fellow supporters will admire your in-depth knowledge - they might not want to get stuck sitting next to you for any duration of time, but they’ll know and understand the cachet that comes with knowing the numbers in the modern football discourse.

The smartarse

You’ll write smart-alecky articles that aren’t very funny for fanzine newsletters poking fun at your fellow football supporters and you’ll attempt to demonstration awareness with a self-referential parody at the end.

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And that’s that - so choose your persona well, fellow supporter, because once you have settled on one, it can take a lot of work to change.

Coming soon in The Oxblogger Newsletter, Part 2 of the Guide to being a Modern Football Supporter: What even is the mixer and what am I supposed to stick in it? Your guide to the ludicrous language of football.