The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Football Fan

Why I created Arsenal Wonderland

I started writing Arsenal Wonderland because I want to share my love of football. Very few of my friends are football fans and very few of them know that I am. Like most of us, I try to keep my addictions to myself. It’s not that I’m ashamed, it’s just that non-fans don’t understand the depth of the relationship. They might paddle about in the World Cup shallows every four years but that doesn’t equip them for what it takes to head out into the open ocean of true football obsession on a weekly basis.

I’ve also kept my fandom to myself because I know how the uninitiated think. For them it's all about tribalism and glory hunting and hooliganism and mindless zealotry. I try to explain that that’s only Spurs fans but that kind of quip just confirms their worst fears. Besides, these days people are so quick to take aim on the flimsiest of whims, the last thing they need is a juicy pre-packaged prejudice tickling their trigger finger. So I keep my head down.

On rare occasions I might try to justify hitching my wagon to a fate I’ve no control over and explain why I dedicate so much time to something that, so often, only produces sigh-ridden days and nightmarish memory flashes. Because, as we all know, losing is the the default experience, the hand in hand everyday love affair (almost) all the time.

Of course this makes what’s happening at Arsenal right now all the more alluring. Under Arteta we’re witnessing the actual walking talking manifestation of that mythical All Conquering Winning Streak and it’s happening before our very eyes in real time, and God knows we haven’t tasted this nectar for 20 years! Drink it down friends, till you’re sated and delirious.

And it’s delicious and seductive stuff, but let’s be honest with ourselves, lurking backstage in life’s perpetual Greek tragedy is the ever waiting downfall of the hero, loss is the Yin to victory's Yang. But, wait, hold on, let me explain, this isn’t me failing to enjoy the moment, this is me relishing one of the true beauties of the game, that football is a reflection of our real life experience. Even when we’re winning, we know we’re always on the precipice of losing, and it’s that very betwixt tension that makes winning so truly enjoyable. Its very fleeting nature is the source of its everlasting sweetness.

During Arsenal’s glorious Invincible's era, I remember knowing that the super sweet sensation of perpetual confidence and victory would eventually transform into a bitter taste in the mouth. Because, as we all know, human fallibility and inevitable decay will eventually strike more often than a Henry screamer. But it’s exactly the delicate, fragile and beguilingly transient nature of a mazy dribble or an elegant outside the box volley that makes it all the more beautiful, all the more precious.

For me it’s the way football gets into my emotional architecture and replicates those never forgotten moments life affirming moments. Remember the tantalising sensuality of peering into the deep blue water a million miles below, as your toes curled over the edge of the ten meter platform for the very first time. Remember that feeling of exhilarating excitement and fear? That sensation of being in the hands of the gods? Isn’t that the exact same feeling when Arsenal stands ready on that beautiful green pitch and the (bloody useless) ref blows the whistle. Every game of every season, there we are, frozen in an incredible anticipatory breathless pause. An eternal moment that never gets old.

But the thing is, if you don’t have football running through your veins, this heady brew of potentiality, vulnerability and sensuality just seems like an exaggeration. It cannot be. It’s just blokes running about innit? Non-football fans just don’t have that interior stadium mainlining their emotions like a perpetual first day at school.

Then there’s Keats, who once described the importance of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, which is almost the perfect description of being a fan. Keats would have loved the incertitude of fandom. I’m not (really) suggesting that football is a spiritual experience (whatever that’s actually supposed to mean) but I an saying that football is like experiencing an accelerated roller-coaster of life in miniature, moment to moment, as the unimaginable unravels before you like a pattern of possibilities bursting into actual happenings, while you, locked in intense focus and wide-eyed attention, find yourself as close as you’ll ever get to seeing your life flash before your eyes without actually being in danger. If there was ever an experience of living in the Now, it’s watching football.

This idea never goes down very well. Hardly ever. A wall of blank stares and raised eyebrows, “you know it’s just a game”, people say. I know, I say, I know.

Of course, football is also pure entertainment, with the pitch as the stage, although instead of actors reading lines there’s actual real-life humans with real-life plots and subplots, twisting and turning and playing out in real time, right there in front of you. The players, like characters in a brilliant series, allow you to revel in their personalities, learn their limits, admire their strengths, calculate and predict their dramas, subject as they are to a million ever shifting circumstances. They surprise you and they disappoint you. They grow and develop and mature and fail. There’s natural born villains and warriors and heroes and fools all performing in astonishing white-knuckle thrillers and none of it, not one bit of it, is scripted! Now that’s got to be better than Netflix.

At this point comes the grimacing slow head shake. It’s not the same at all, people will say.

(Image credit: PA)

Ok, but you can’t underestimate the athleticism. It's a deep and ancient pleasure to see players renew their membership of Mother Nature on a weekly basis. The enviable form of these balanced super athletes is a reminder of what beauty and skill the human body is capable of. Sometimes, like an unexpected punchline, a player will perform a move, a jink, a drawback or a turn that floors you, baffles you, provoking nothing but wordless infantile exclamations of amazement as they advance with growing hope, increasing tension, tantalising anticipation, the ball, pinging around like it’s got mind of its own, making it’s way toward the goal, the rollercoaster reaching the pinnacle, their goalie flying through the air like a pointless wall of mist, when, as if from nowhere the net begins rippling and the inevitable knee-sliding chest beating glorious release, this shared petit mort, where a million souls explode with united abandon, this is the goal, literally the goal. These are the moment’s when finally, in a flash, in the midst of a delirious roar, the world is finally at peace.

Unfortunately however, the footballing world isn’t at peace. I’ll sadly admit there is the disturbing hypocrisy within FIFA, I’ll concede the cringing football headlines and the insane inequality generating policies and I’ll grant that football has been hijacked by a set of horrendous values that engender greed, rivalry and division. But that’s because football is embedded in a wider world where those values are triumphant.

But below this despicable veneer lies a layer of human connection and love that pierces these enforced divisions, where people open their arms and embrace each other in our perpetual search for friendship and acceptance and belonging. Football straps us all into a simultaneous experience of bonding and camaraderie where we become one, where we share joy, share pain and the mirage of separation is momentarily removed. Being with fellow football fans is like arriving home and finally speaking your mother tongue, you understand each other without effort, there’s no self conscious otherness, no need to explain your peculiar ways, no questions, no condescending glances.

In the end, I guess it’s simple. I just love football, and I want a place to share what thoughts I have with you dear reader. Arsenal Wonderland is a place to soften the blow of those sigh-ridden days, to console ourselves within the Greek Tragedy of fandom, to abandon reaching for fact and reason and instead embrace the uncertainty, the mystery and the doubt as together we stand on that metaphorical 10-meter platform above that oh so enticing possible victory below.

And of course, it’s a place to revel in the glory that is Arsenal these very days, because, let it not go unnoticed, WE ARE BACK WHERE WE BELONG!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this three day, three article, launch. Next week (not quite sure which day) I’ll post the first of the ongoing weekly Arsenal Wonderland articles.

Have a great week and come on you Gunners, subscribe, and share Arsenal Wonderland with your Arsenal clan!