Football fans love to hate and love to scoff; this misery-full weekend left us delighted
We’ve been pretty down on this Premier League season at various points so let’s give credit where it’s due: that was a brilliant weekend.
And the not-so-secret reason why it was such a brilliant weekend? Misery. Despair. Hearts breaking in two.
We haven’t yet fully recovered from the saccharine, sickly sweet response to Newcastle’s Carabao Cup win, an event we were all instructed was one of great wondrousness that we should all be enjoying. We were baffled then and remain baffled now.
Why should anyone other than Newcastle fans be delighted about Newcastle winning something?
What we do understand is why for plenty of other ‘neutral’ supporters it was the more desirable outcome from the final. Everton supporters, for instance. Manchester United supporters. Any fans who find Liverpool’s This Means More exceptionalism more grating than Newcastle’s Best Fans in the World exceptionalism.
And that brings us to the key point underpinning so much of football fandom. It’s not just about nice things happening to your team; it’s about bad things happening to other teams. And not necessarily even ones you particularly dislike.
When you stop and think about it, this is obvious. If we had to rely on the joy our own teams actually provide us then almost all of us would surely have packed up the daft idea of following a football team years ago. For the vast majority of clubs the joy-despair ratio is all wrong.
No, what keeps us coming back over and over is the fact that no matter what guff and nonsense your lot might be up to, at least someone else somewhere is showing more of their arse.
READ: Premier League winners and losers: Amorim and Ange, Newcastle, Dias, Rusk, Beto, Jackson
Now to be clear here, we’re not subscribers to the idea that rivals’ disappointment should be more important than your own success. There’s a sliding scale here, but this is where we’d place ourselves: Spurs fans being quite happy to lose to Man City and scupper Arsenal’s league hopes at no great cost to themselves (avoiding Champions League qualification last season could yet prove their best decision in decades…) is absolutely fine, but Spurs fans who would settle for the hypothetical scenario of them not winning the Europa League if it meant Arsenal not winning the Champions League is too much.
But the disappointment and upset of others is still a huge part of being a football fan and it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise. It’s one more reason why we didn’t really understand that whole Newcastle thing. Knowing other fans are having their piss boiled to dangerous levels is a huge contributing factor to what makes your own success so enjoyable.
Why would you want everyone else to be happy about it? Where’s the fun in that? This applies to success both large and small, too. Do Liverpool fans enjoy their title win more or less because it’s caused Mikel Arteta’s salty head to fall off? Do Southampton fans enjoy their point against Man City more or less because it’s caused Ruben Dias’ salty head to fall off?
The whole guard of honour discourse is quite silly, but its existence tells us that deep down we all know this phenomenon is real. The idea of seeing Chelsea or Arsenal or whoever forced into this weird ritual humiliation by a luckless quirk of the fixture list is deeply enjoyable for everyone else.
Which brings us back to this weekend and why it was so good: because so few people were actually happy.
Man City weren’t happy because Southampton decided to actually defend against them, which is in fairness quite poor etiquette when they haven’t bothered with it against anyone else for 35 games.
Arsenal aren’t happy because they’ve won nothing again and have dread fear about multiple potential banter outcomes to this season.
Even Liverpool weren’t happy at their latest Anfield title party because they had simply no choice but to boo a player who has helped deliver everything those fans had craved for 30 years but now fancies playing for the biggest football club on earth for a bit.
Chelsea: not happy.
Man United and Spurs: involved in what is perhaps the all-time greatest season-long act of piss-boiling ever conceived, one which can now only end with one of those clubs as happy as a dog with two dicks while the other hits new depths of despair and everyone else is furious about one side of the equation and laughing their bollocks clear off about the other.
They are, therefore, clearly the two standout clubs of this season and we have no notes. The fact they have now become so committed to ensuring they finish 16th and 17th to maximise the emotional extremes at the end of it all is truly magnificent.
Even Nottingham Forest have found a way to bring misery upon themselves in a season that now brings a guaranteed place in European competition next season. The owner is literally on the pitch having a go at the manager because they might now only finish seventh.
Here, then, is just another way this game is far more about misery than joy. Because the shift in expectations that follows things like Forest’s profoundly unlikely-looking season means that ‘We’d have given everything to be precisely where we are now back in August’ ends up meaning two-fifths of f*ck all in reality even though its logic is utterly impeccable.
Do we have any actual problem with Nottingham Forest? Not really. Did we nevertheless take perverse and extreme delight in pinpointing the precise moment yesterday where their hearts broke in two? Of course we did.
And don’t pretend you didn’t feel it too.
Social media and ragebait and the wider collapse of society in general may have all helped hasten football’s descent into rabid and often unhealthy tribalism, but let’s not pretend the despair of others hasn’t always been an absolute core element of fan culture.
We all love to hate.