Events | 2009.08.20
The peak of the season | Paul MacInnes
For most football fans, the high point is three days before kick-off. Already my optimism is crushed
Each year an under-worked academic will invent a formula to determine which day in the year Britons are at their happiest (it\'s in June, apparently) . But whatever their qualifications, it seems unlikely the study\'s authors are season ticket holders at Mansfield Town. For the happiest point in a football fan\'s year is three days before the season begins. It doesn\'t get better than that.
In fact, almost without exception, it gets steadily worse. Worse and worse and worse until, at the very end of the season, you are left disgusted with yourself; disgusted at having considered football to be entertainment, instead of penance for some unspecified sin; disgusted for having conformed to the acme of stupidity by fastening yourself to the fortunes of an individual team.
Sadly, being a supporter is kind of central to being a football fan. The person who claims simply to be a fan of the game is not usually to be trusted (and, in my opinion, is concealing deep-seated scars that will prevent them from forming any lasting emotional relationship). It\'s being a supporter that stimulates the delusory optimism of early August, the dreamy state in which your new £350,000 striker from Workington leads your team not only to promotion but victory against a Martian Invaders Select XI, thus securing the freedom of planet Earth.
By the middle of September, however, such optimism will be dashed. For all bar a small handful – those who have either got lucky or support Manchester United – the inevitable descent will have begun. Your team, far from proving invincible, will have proven incompetent; your manager will have been sacked; and your star striker will have had his head turned by a £250 offer to test the H1N1 vaccine.
Why in the world does this happen? Why do us football fans, the odd gleeful pessimist aside, build ourselves up so giddily when we know it won\'t last and, in fact, will only make the inevitable fall that much more painful?
An explanation might be found in Barack Obama. Or perhaps the FTSE index (but not in Mervyn King). It\'s almost certainly lurking in the pituitary glands of whoever coined the phrase "barbecue summer". The football fan\'s delusion might be best understood as a replica shirt-wearing version of a more common inclination to disregard the probable and indulge in the idea of the pleasurable: global warming.
In an interesting article at OpenDemocracy.org, Chris Goodall discusses the reluctance of the majority to take seriously the threat of climate change. He suggests that one of the contributing factors might be something called optimism bias, a hardwired tendency to accord undue value to the most satisfactory possible outcome. Observed by neurologists, it is even familiar to the Department of Transport, who have their own "guidance document" for dealing with the "demonstrated, systematic, tendency for project appraisers to be overly optimistic" (fans of high-speed rail might wish to switch on their own optimism bias now).
On the one hand, it may be the case that without optimism bias, there could be no romance. Without it, however, the potential for finding oneself as sick as a parrot would also be significantly reduced. With that in mind, I think I owe my own club a round of thanks. On Saturday morning I was doing my best to subdue thoroughly improbable optimism. By 4pm, when I walked out at half-time during Norwich City\'s 7–1 home defeat to Colchester United, the biggest drubbing in our history, I found my emotional balance entirely restored. I think that\'s something of a record.
paul.macinnes@guardian.co.uk
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/11/football-season-fans
