Fans changing allegiances

[The Red Baron]

This is about a Charlton fan who has now decided to support Yeovil? Would you do it? I certainly couldn't... and didn't!


WHY AREN'T FOOTBALL FANS ALLOWED TO SWAP TEAMS?
Loyalty in football died years ago, so why is football supporter Rupert
Hawksley made to feel guilty for switching his allegiance from one club to
another? By Rupert Hawksley, from The Telegraph

If someone had asked me in December which football team I support, I would
have proudly declared myself a life-long Charlton Athletic fan. I would then
have laughed politely at one of a possible two jokes that any football
supporter worth the polyester on their back can be relied upon to make: "Bad
luck" or "Ah, so you're the other one".

When asked the same question today, my answer is slightly different, though
the "one-size-fits-all" jokes remain the same. Having moved to the South
West of England, I now swear my solemn allegiance to Yeovil Town. It is not,
I concede, the kind of glamorous transfer likely to rock the very
foundations of the sport, but I am aware that this defection will not make
me popular among football fans. In fact, I suspect a puppy-murdering traffic
warden with halitosis and an unhealthy interest in his friends' wives would
have more chance of being bought a pint down the local pub.

Like many a morally corrupt love-rat, I had flirted for a while with the
idea of jumping into bed with a new partner. I sang her name adoringly and
courted her with expensive weekend breaks away, all the while resolutely
denying to myself any wrongdoing. We were just having fun, right? "Sure, we
get on really well together," I'd bluster, "but obviously I'm still in love
with Charlton. I would never do that to her."

Then I began to check the Yeovil Town result before any other on Teletext
(which I understand is now referred to as the Internet). Of course I
continued to ostentatiously celebrate Charlton Athletic goals, lest anyone
grew suspicious, but it all began to feel rather hollow.

Pele may have likened football to religion but, when it eventually came, my
betrayal - for I am told no other word will suffice - was disappointingly
mundane. No moment of profound enlightenment, no sinister initiation
ceremony and, most regrettably of all, no thrice-crowing rooster. There was
just a Tuesday-evening text message in late-January to a fellow Yeovil Town
fan reading: "Good news for us, Charlton getting stuffed." Yeovil Town was
no longer just my bit on the side. I was, and remain, a disgraced adulterer.


This is football's last great taboo, even though loyalty in the sport died
years ago. Clubs swap players and managers like Top Trumps cards; agents
hold chairmen to ransom; owners focus ever more on the bottom line, without
so much as a thought for such lofty conceits as 'heritage' and 'tradition'.
Even the fans - so often referred to as the victims of all this - are not
blameless, merrily forgiving the latest Judas to cross some unspeakable
divide, just as long as said Judas starts scoring regularly, of course.

In 2010, Manchester United's Wayne Rooney publicly courted Manchester City,
his employer's bitter and very wealthy rivals. A mob of angry Manchester
United fans turned up on the striker's doorstep, demanding answers (which
incidentally never came). Last week, Rooney became United's highest paid
player of all time. On Saturday, the fans were singing his name.

So why is it that the defection of a single fan should provoke
spittle-flecked tirades full of exhausted cliches: "through thick and thin";
"till I die"; "over my dead body"? It seems to be the only thing to unite an
otherwise partisan world.

Football, like all sport, is a form of entertainment. If you cease to be
entertained by the product, surely it is entirely justifiable to look
elsewhere. Those who do should not be hanged from the nearest floodlight by
the burning scarf of their new club. In years gone by, when the overwhelming
majority of fans did actually support their local teams, jumping ship would
have been interpreted as a betrayal of one's history, a dismissive two
fingers to the area in which you grew up and to the community that shaped
your personality.

As Michael Brunskill from the Football Supporters Foundation told me:
"Football is an extremely tribal sport and many fans obviously follow their
home-town teams. In that sense their whole identity can be entwined with
their team. Change colours, and people will question your loyalty, or use it
as shorthand to suggest you might not be the most trustworthy."

The problem with that sepia-tinted argument is that fewer people support
their home town teams nowadays. The crowded weekend trains from London to
Manchester pay testament to this. Besides, locality is a conveniently
flexible construct for the football fan. Living in Barnet seems to be all
the justification you need to support Arsenal, rather than, say, Barnet. And
I wonder how many people living in Birkenhead follow Liverpool, as opposed
to the less successful Tranmere Rovers. How trustworthy are they?

I appreciate that an away trip to League One's Rotherham holds less appeal
than a Champions League date with AC Milan, but it does strike me that
football fans are liable to be selective about which forms of betrayal they
condemn.

"I've spoken to fans who have become disillusioned with the globalised
football giant on their doorstep, and now feel more at home with a local
non-League side," Brunskill explained. "You feel less like a customer in
that sense, more part of a club, all pulling in the same direction."

To my mind, this is inconsistent. To abandon the "globalised football giant"
(read: successful football club) you have always supported, for a grassroots
alternative is apparently viewed by fans as some courageous and admirable
step, which only a rarefied few dare take. But what about those non-League
fans who have become disillusioned with the Midland Combination League, for
example, and do want to be treated like a valued customer? Those fans who
have grown weary of huddling with 20 other anoraks in a leaky stand the
chairmen cannot afford to renovate, watching 22 part-timers kick chunks out
of each other? Sell-out! Glory boy! Prawn sandwich eater!

Rather irritatingly, none of these jibes can be levelled at me. Yeovil Town
happen to be two places below Charlton Athletic in the second-tier of
English football, and you'd have to be mad to eat a prawn sandwich from any
of the suspect-looking food outlets scattered about the home ground, Huish
Park. On reflection, perhaps I should have swapped for Chelsea, currently
sat top of the Premier League - it's never too late, I suppose.

[River Don]

I've lived in a few places and often near football grounds.

None of them have ever made the slightest difference to my loyalty to the Rovers. However, I have taken notice of how these clubs have been getting on and even watched some midweek games when I haven't been able to get to Donny or when Rovers weren't playing.

I suppose if I were to move to a place and stay there for a very long time, then the place might start to feel more like home and the local club might become a genuine second team.

[IDM]

I moved around a lot, particularly in the late 80s and throughout the 90s.  It was never convenient/practical/affordable to consistently get back to Belle Vue, although I would when visiting my family.  Therefore I adopted several other teams on my travels, which I then "followed" although my heart was always with Doncaster

This was simply because I enjoyed (and still do) actually attending football matches.  When I first moved somewhere, I would go and see the nearest (decent level) team, or teams.  After a while of going to the same ground week in week out, you do get an affinity but not a lifelong bond.  The only problem occurs when one of those teams then plays vs Doncaster!

[BillyStubbsTears]

Back in the 1990s when David Mellor had an affair with that skiny bint of a non-entity and the story was that he'd knobbed her wearing Chelsea shirt, the papers were in uproar about his infidelity.

To me, the big infidelity was the fact that, before the Chelsea supporting John Major became PM, Mellor had been a Fulham fan. What sort of man would change his football team in mid-life, just to please his boss?

[Filo]

Back in the 1990s when David Mellor had an affair with that skiny bint of a non-entity and the story was that he'd knobbed her wearing Chelsea shirt, the papers were in uproar about his infidelity.

To me, the big infidelity was the fact that, before the Chelsea supporting John Major became PM, Mellor had been a Fulham fan. What sort of man would change his football team in mid-life, just to please his boss?

A swivel-eyed right wing nutter?

[CusworthRovers]

I've lived all over the place and often I've been unable to get to Donny due to location or lack of sterling.

A very good mate of mine was a massive Luton fan, so I would go to some of their home games and he would come to some of the Donny away games.

Likewise I have lived in Edgware and that too me to quite a few Watford games.

I lived in Barnet and went to many of theirs.

Also my then girlfriends family were either Spurs or Hammers fans, so again I went to a few of them.

I would also go and see the 2 Sheffields and Leeds when they came to London.

In them their 80's I probably saw way more other teams than I did Donny.

Still classed myself a Donny fan though, but not so much a follower it seemed.

[IC1967]

I am a Leeds fan and a Rovers fan. If Rovers play Leeds I have a dilemma. It all depends on the context of the game as to who I want to win. For example if Rovers played Leeds and needed to win to stay up and the game meant nothing to Leeds, I'd want Rovers to win. However if the result of the game meant Leeds went up or qualified for the play-offs, and Rovers went down I'd want Leeds to win.

I'm not a heart rules his head merchant. I would view the situation logically. Leeds going up would return them to their rightful place in the Premiership. Rovers going down would return them to their proper level so no long term harm would be done.

[River Don]

What if it was a play off final between Leeds and Rovers to make it into the Premiership?

Winning would represent Rovers greatest ever achievement. For Leeds it would be the usual thing a few years in the top division before they are forced to return to their natural level in the Championship.

[IC1967]

I'd want Rovers to win. It might never happen again in my lifetime whereas Leeds will always be Premier League potential.

[Muttley]

I'd want Rovers to win. It might never happen again in my lifetime whereas Leeds will always be Premier League potential.

That's a bit of a defeatist attitude, they might actually make it one day.

[IC1967]

You sir are a dreamer. I on the other hand am a realist.

[Muttley]

You sir are a dreamer. I on the other hand am a realist.

I was referring to your opinion on Leeds.