Article Response: A Local Club...

I'm surprised this one hasn't had a response. I thought this was a tremendous article and actually rather provocative.

Maybe it should have been entitled "The Fascism of Football Fandom" after all.

It's a fine article and an excellent lead-in to TMFD, but there's only so much of a fuck I can give about football.

I liked it a lot.

Cheekily, if anything I'm not sure it goes far enough. It unpicks the real/fake fan delineation very neatly but it doesn't question the assumption that to be a football fan you must also be a club fan.

Not AFAIK a problem here, where any talent the local teams have is immediately poached by The Mainland, but you still get a lot of fans of the national team, which repoaches them and a few others.

This is a terrific article. Tom is right in what it omits, but that is rather another level - obviously if you aren't a fan of the club at all, you can't be a Real Fan of the club. It's an odd point for me, too - I love Bristol Rovers deeply, but most of the football I see is on the TV, and it isn't Rovers. I don't much care who wins the Premiership - I tend to like to see the teams that entertain me most do well, and I'm slightly pleased when the teams I don't enjoy watching flop, but this is tepid at best for me. Mostly I watch it for top class football without caring deeply about the result. I'm not sure that not addressing this is a fault in the article, though.