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What is football about, anyway?

10/09/2024
By Daniel Hidalgo-Anguera
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Daniel Hidalgo-Anguera discusses the increasing demand for perfection from football fans. What repercussions could the 'trophy or nothing' mentality have on fans' enjoyment of the game, and of life?

"Emirates Stadium" by wonker is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

As a lifelong (and suffering) Arsenal fan, I watched on as Rodri and Foden sunk my dreams and delivered Manchester City the title last May with three well-taken finishes against West Ham. After Rodri’s strike more or less sealed the deal, I turned off the Manchester City broadcast to spend a final 30 minutes or so with my beloved Arsenal team. When Kai Havertz struck into an empty net to deliver Arsenal a victory late on, there was a tangibly subdued celebration in the stadium. Both the fans and players were sunk with the knowledge that it was not enough to deliver what they had been so hungry for.  

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Later that evening, I took to social media, as I often do, to perform a ritualistic sort of group therapy with my fellow Arsenal fans. Much of this involved discussing the season, announcing our hopes for the next one, and batting away deliberate trolls from rival fans. However, one social media post really stuck in my mind. It was a compilation of Arsenal’s late winners last season – Rice 90+7’ vs Luton, Rice 90+6’ vs Manchester United, Havertz 89’ vs Brentford, Martinelli 86’ vs Manchester City, and so on. Over the footage of the winners was a sad slow song, and the caption ‘all these winners for nothing’. This was made as an almost identical copy to one I had seen earlier that month of Liverpool fans (whose team slumped to 3rd place) similarly going over and discarding their many dramatic winners as eventually meaningless.  

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It got me thinking, were they right? I mean, were these goals, these moments, truly meaningless? If the fans in the stadium had known that Martinelli’s winner vs Man City early in the season would be as effectively ineffective as Havertz’ strike against Everton, would the crowd have had that similar, subdued reaction?  

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Football is often portrayed by pundits, managers and pub debaters alike as a game about winning. That is it. When asked about a player, manager, or team’s quality, you will often hear: ‘Well what have they won?’ This has increasingly become the case in a world where media and public attention focuses evermore on the very top levels of competition – the Premier League title race, or the UEFA Champions League, for example. Fans of big clubs often talk about a ‘winning mentality’: scoring every chance, winning every match, and taking every trophy is essential. It’s a mentality that has crept into almost every sport: an obsession with perfectionism, both in pursuit of the goal of winning, but also as a show of self. Wanting only the best and refusing to settle for anything less is seen as a virtue in the sporting world. To anyone familiar with competitive sports, this sort of thinking seems like common sense. However, it is the orthodoxy which not only holds the sporting world in its grip, but continues to creep into our everyday lives. School, University and professional lives demand a competitive mindset: you must continually improve and strive for perfection. If you’re not so sure that this is the case, simply go to your next interview and tell them you’re just happy to do roughly the same forever, never improving nor wanting to. If you get a call back offering you the job, please do send me an email and call me an idiot.  

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Job interviews aside, my point is that this mentality of perfectionism has crept beyond simply elite level sportspeople and it is actively in opposition to what sport and life is really about – joy.  

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Sure, if you told me mid-game that my centre-back had the mentality of ‘I’m just going to enjoy the moment and try my best’ I might be a bit more concerned about conceding. But fans are not professional athletes. We are allowed to get lost in the joy of sport, and of everyday life. It would be silly of me to regret running around my house after Rice’s winner vs Luton just because we failed to turn a draw into a win. The full season result of a Manchester City win does nothing to take away from the joy that my club brought me. The way that games structured my week – my Thursday seminar being just 2 days away from a 12.30 kick-off – giving me little bits of hope and a push to go again each day, is something lost in the pursuit of perfection. That is not even to touch upon the little stories that play out over the course of a season: Havertz’ redemption arc, Rice finally competing at a top level, Saka establishing himself as a superstar. The very real connection I felt with 3 strangers who will never know me is the joy of sport, and life – and one uninterrupted by a matter of 2 points.  

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As I have already alluded to, this is not just a matter for sport. The demand for perfectionism, continual growth and ‘elite mentality’ seeps into our everyday lives under our social system. Whatever the institution, you will be told - and most likely will tell yourself – that you need to work harder, make sacrifices, rise up the ladder, and play the game. You will be encouraged to adopt the ‘elite’ (sporting) mentality – strive for the best or nothing at all. By all means, do as you wish. If the constant focus on the end, on reaching the peak, is what will drive you and bring you enjoyment and satisfaction, there is nothing wrong in that. But don’t just do it because that’s the expectation. I urge us all to resist the perfectionist compulsion, to enjoy the moments, the small victories, the milestones. When your club get a resounding win over a rival, celebrate. When you finally put that tough project you had been dreading to bed, celebrate. Do not let the looming future of possibilities deny you the joy you feel in the moment. The satisfaction that the little things give you should not be interrupted by a focus on the grander picture.  

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There will be times when you cannot reach the perfection you wanted - your team does not win that big trophy, you don’t get that role you had been working for, or your vision isn’t fully realised. But you must remember that it was not ‘all for nothing’. The moments counted, you lived and felt them, and that cannot be taken away from you. Football and life are not zero-sum games about the end, the trophies, or the perfection clinched. They are about joy.  

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So go into this next season of sport, and your life, and enjoy each moment. Get lost in each emotion, each day, and each victory. And if you reach the end and aren’t where you wanted to be, well, there’s always next season, right?  

"Do not let the looming future of possibilities deny you the joy you feel in the moment"
"Wanting only the best and refusing to settle for anything less is seen as a virtue in the sporting world"

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