I will never forget the day I legged it to school football practice even more enthusiastically than usual, desperate to find my mate Ollie. That morning (and this was well before the era of mobile phones having internet) I’d read an apparently serious rumour that our club, Manchester United, were on the brink of signing Gabriel Batistuta. This was massive, and the drive to share the euphoria gave me a burst of pace that would have raised a few WADA eyebrows.
“Batigol is singing!” I yelled from the other end of the pitch. Ollie turned and grinned – then falter slightly. I barely noticed from the distance, but in hindsight I recall the odd tilt of his head that should have been a giveaway sign.
“Erm… I don’t support United any more mate…” he eventually let slip after I caught my breath back.
That moment of betrayal, disappointment, horror and confusion will remain with me forever. What did he just say? Surely I had misheard.
“Yeah, my mum supports them, so I thought I should too.”
This wasn’t making it any better. In fairness, he wasn’t a close mate and I barely knew a thing about his family background; perhaps his parents had separated, and it was an emotional thing, which of course could be understood. Couldn’t it?
It’s a question I’ve mulled over in the broader sense – can you really change your team, I mean deep down on a visceral, soul-enrapturing level? The answer of course is no. Not in the truest sense of ‘team’ at least. There are wildly different circumstances for allegiances shifting, but I’m talking about your team in the way that owners are merely custodians of the entity that belongs to the people.
Over the years, however, I have begun to formulate my own understanding of vocabulary pertaining to this vitally important area of the sport we all love. ‘My club’ is at the pinnacle. This is your raison d’etre for reading, writing, watching, debating, loving, screaming, collapsing, rebuilding the game. For this, there can only be one, and one alone.
To put it in another context, a former girlfriend of mine from Latin America once said to me in one of our more tender moments that she loved me. In Spanish there are two main ways to say those three words, she explained (I did know this from school studies, but it wasn’t the time to point-scoring): Te Quiero, which literally translates as ‘I want you’, and is largely affectionate and can be used quite widely, and Te Amo. The latter, she said, you only use for the love of your life, and you can only say it once.
I’ll leave you to guess which one she said to me.
So if you can only say Te Amo to “your club” – by definition, on only one occasion in your entire life – what other options are there? You can support a club, naturally. This feels more like a commercial term in my books; a commodity, a product consumer, a statistic. That may come across as a very harsh, cold criticism, and perhaps it is, but that’s purely my gut feeling when I hear the word.
You can be a fan of a club. This, I posit, describes a more emotive connection that digs into the actions relating to the team. You care about what happens to them, the fixtures carry extra meaning than just base entertainment.
Following a side is a far looser term that to be honest can refer to almost anything in my books from going to some games to merely raising a flicker of an eyebrow at the results in the paper. We all follow, to some degree at least, a few sides for the tenuous links we may have to them, and quite often it barely registers on the emotive scale when they win or lose.
Whether you agree with my use of the definitions or not, we can all agree there a myriad of manners in which one can claim association to a football club, but here’s the crux of it: can you have more than one team at any one time?
When challenged by her father to impress him with an expression of how much she loves him in a straight shootout between the three sisters to receive a portion of his kingdom, Cordelia replies that she loves him with only half her heart. King Lear explodes in fury at her apparent nonchalant lack of passion, and banishes her from his sight only to understand she was merely telling the truth; like her two sisters, she was married, and simply explained it was not possible to love her father with all her heart, as at least half was reserved for her marriage.
Football is a lot like love. We get jilted, sparks fly, passions and memories melt into unmarked mystery, and hearts most certainly are broken and enflamed in equal measure. Can you divide a heart proportionately between two football clubs though? Do the machinations of love work identically whether concerning people or sport?
In my experience, the answer is yes. I was born in Manchester United as my father loved them – he went to Wembley for the 1968 European Cup Final, and adored the hedonistic chaos of George Best as much as the gentlemanly beacon of Sir Bobby Charlton – and was never given a choice. That’s how it should be; passed on through generations. It is the closest professional club to the house I called home for the first 25 years of my life.
Even closer, though, is Altrincham Town. They have never reached the Football League, despite several epic giant-killing battles in the 1970s, although as I write this they are pushing very hard for promotion from the National League in their first-ever season as a fully professional club. Moss Lane is a classic, tiny non-league ground with advertising boards a metre from the pitch and gnarly old men who look like they’ve never moved for decades rigidly stuck in their same spots every game.
Onetime I watched a reasonably talented left-footed centre-back called greg Young hoof yet another ball into the channels towards nobody in particular. In one of those delicious moments of perfect timing, the crowd noise dipped just in time for me to yell “Why the f**k did you do that Greg??”
“He turned round, not even that startled, and simply threw back: “The gaffer told me to!” with a hurt expression etched across his face.
That moment alone would make most people forever hold the club close to them, but there were so many more; left winger Nicky Clee joined the rest of the players on another occasion in the community centre club bar after the game, and simply sat next to me while I was finishing my pint. “Alright Nicky? Feeling OK?”
“Yeah mate, knackered after that game. At least they got pasta bake on the menu tonight though eh?”
The most normal thing in the world. Terracing, genuine heartfelt passion, raucous support, local community spirit… There is an experience there I will never get anywhere else. That has to count for something, surely? So Alty claim a piece of my heart.
I spent a year studying in Ferrara in Italy’s Emilia Romagna region during my university days. I use the term studying loosely; far more importantly, I spent every possible weekend working out if I could afford to catch the train to whichever far-flung game to see Societa Polisportivo Ars et Labor, more commonly known as SPAL, in what was then known as Serie C2 B in the regional fourth tier.
Sensational hot chocolate at half time, a historic club – Denis Law once punched out an opponent cold on the pitch at the Paolo Mazza when playing for Torino in the 1960s, while Fabio Capello met his wife in Ferrara while wearing the blue and white stripes – epic away trips (none more incredible than the traipse across Tuscany involving a veteran scout, a beautiful teenage girl, a salp-up lunch of olives, tomatoes, flowing red wine and wafer-thin meat and a road trip all the way back up north). I got to know the ultras during one trip away to Reggiana, and cried in agony as we lost in the promotion playoffs. We mingled in a tiny corner bar with Divine Fonjock, the Cameroonian midfield enforcer. Try telling me they are not also ‘my’ club, and words will be had.
That was one wild, whirlwind of a season, a holiday romance of fiery proportions, and will likely never be revisited, but it will always hold my affections.
For the last 14 years I have been living in Siberia, where my local side FC Tyumen have yo-yoed between the third and second tiers, with one glorious Russian Cup win over the mighty Zenit St. Petersburg in 2013. I went in person to the away game last summer in Perm to watch the vital promotion-clinching 2-0 win over Amkar (who once hosted the Fulham of Clint Dempsey and co in the UEFA Cup in the same stadium where Aleksandr Korotaev finished the coolest one-on-one to send us up a few months ago). The game finished, we waited nervously watching the other key game which we needed our rivals to drop points in to guarantee we went up, and when their final whistle blew at 0-0 we went absolutely ballistic in the stands. By we, I mean me and the only other person who actually made the 700km trip. The team all came over and gave us high fives over the fence; we shared that moment with them.
Tyumen are my hometown club now; there is no way in hell they are not ‘my’ club.
I have held a press pass to Ural Ekaterinburg for the best part of a decade. Ekaterinburg is just down the road in Russian terms (330km), and those endless road trips racing to watch some top-flight action, get to know the entire press pack, not to mention two Russian Cup finals in World Cup stadia in Sochi and Samara, and what was arguably the most incredible live stadium experience i have had in my life.
Ural are never going to win the league. They’ve never even won a major trophy. Spartak Moscow are by far the most popular side in the country, on the other hand, and have won more titles than anyone else. Spartak have been a shadow of their 2017 title-winning selves, but are still a huge club with quality players; back in August in one of the season’s earliest league fixtures they arrived against plucky Ural, and from the off our boys fought relentlessly, but played with an expansive style that would have blown away Real Madrid. That’s how they made the packed stadium feel, anyway.
Danijel Miskic missed an early penalty, but on the stroke of half time redeemed himself with the opener. Spartak were struggling to cope with the adrenalin soaked wave, but somehow went 2-1 up with 10 minutes remaining in that depressingly familiar way: good try boys, but we’re just not good enough. The manager throws on academy wonderkid Ilya Ishkov, and summer signing Igor Dimitriev for an injection of pace, and the fearless teenagers just let rip. They know no fear, terrorising the visiting defenders with a reckless abandon that was hypnotic. One breakaway led by them both created a huge gap, and a rebounded shot was tucked in for 2-2 by our experienced Andrey Egorychev.
One last throw of the dice. Club legend Eric Bicfalvi has been injured for months, and in truth is not ready, but he is sent on with dded time left. He has no pace, he has little energy, but he has heart. One last ball over the top into the channel is running out of play with the allotted minutes already up, and that’s that.
Or is it….? Bicfalvi chases the lost cause with every last drop, and stretches out a leg. The keeper has only realised too late and can’t challenge him, and watched in horror as the ball loops up from virtually the byline, over his head, towards the far post… before sneaking just inside it for a winner with what was the very last touch of the game.
It was an irrelevant result in the grand scheme of things, but for less than three British pounds i had experienced more energy, emotion and heart-thumping tension in 90 minutes than some people will ever experience in a lifetime. Try telling me Ural are not ‘my’ club.
Can you support more than one club? Can you be a fan of more than one club? Can you love more than one club? If you are still asking that question, you need to find another sport.
Heart of Football 
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