To a non-football fan, the obsession does seem very peculiar. Yet, because football is a seemingly unavoidable part of the zeitgeist, nearly everyone grows to accept it as the norm - just as you might become inured to the fact that a random selection of noises and aggressive, misogynistic words, put to a beat, is considered popular music. If you do doubt the validity of football, you generally do it in private, away from the blaring trumpets of the football fraternity, in case you offend their sensitive souls.
Football and Celebrity Cooking Programmes
Football fans can find even the dullest of games watchable because they appreciate the difficulty of basic football skills. This is because many fans play the game. They can relate to, to a certain extent, what goes on on the pitch. By analysing and comparing their ability to those of the professionals they improve their knowledge (new vanities become possible) and can improve their own ability (even more vanities possible). A non-football fan neither appreciates the difficulty of, say, controlling a long ball nor cares to learn to perform or even appreciate the skill. Hence, the square pass is meaningless to them.
A helpful comparison of this "technical skill" interest of the football fan, is the cooking enthusiasts interest in celebrity cooking programmes. Unless you cook and appreciate the skill and effort (make-believe skill and effort, perhaps) you really won't find a celebrity cook compelling viewing. This "technical skill" interest of the football fan is the most valid reason for watching football. The excuses run dry from here.
Football and Reality TV:
One of the most compelling aspects of football to the fans is its episodic nature. We naturally want to know more, once we have a certain level of knowledge about something, especially when it involves gossip and high emotion. Why do people fall for two-penny reality tv shows with pathetic or even loathsome participants and a shoddy premise that would disappoint in a shanty town (and, usually, a host, who's perma tan bulging face wouldn't know a shanty town if one fell on it). It's all because we learn about the characters, their personalities, their objectives and we sympathise, detest, rage and speculate and we grow curious as to what will happen next. The curiosity and urge to speculate drives us onto the next episode and the next.
It's only once the final of "Longest Toenails 2009" has come and gone, the delirious winner announced and promptly forgotten, that we reflect - and realise the whole thing was tat. Meaningless, pointless, tat. The thing about football is that there is no end. A tournament ends, a season starts and so on. Football's backstory is interminable and the more the fan absorbs, the more they anticipate the future story-line, with its innumerable plot-lines, peddled and stewed by the media and other busy money-spinning speculators.
Football and Tribalism :
Football is tribalistic. We become fans of clubs and all we care about, to a large extent, is our own success. The supporters of clubs form a community and the individual feels empowered to be part of this 'proud' entity, with its illustrious history. We celebrate manically when our team wins, despite not having contributed anything meaningfully to that success. We act as if we were integrally involved.
To stop supporting a club is to lose that sense of community and empowerment, which is why we may find it difficult to even contemplate giving it all up.
Football and Nike
Modern football is a commercial business of massive proportions. This means that branding is at the forefront. The idea of branding is to hype the product to the max. Forget rationality or truthfulness, boast every quality for your product that you can. So, a media organisation that sells a football product (live games on tv or newspapers) will sensationalise the game of football in a bid to manipulate the fan into believing that the next match is about life and death.
A football club will market itself as a super-aspirational source of coolness and success, if only you buy the shirt...attend the games...subscribe to the station etc. etc. Never mind that the players act like morons or aren't actually that good, its the deception that counts. The deception is that football is everything and footballers are gods.
So, if football is hardwired into the psyche as being cool, how can you resist it's allure? How can you deny that that goal was simply a fortunate long shot and not "a spectacular goal of sublime quality that must go down in the history of civilisation as a epoch making moment."?
No one's there to say, "hang on" it was just a goal, he's just a footballer - it's just a game.
SO there you are non-footy befuddled people. Why is football so popular and why are people infatuated with matches in which nothing happens for the majority of the time? It's because football is a Frankenstein monster hybrid of all that is addictive of Reality TV, Cooking Programmes, Designer Brands and Tribalism.
There is nothing wrong with you if you don't care about football (as you probably know). In fact, you are missing out on a particularly virulent strain of Reality TV-Celeb Cook-Designer Brand-Tribalism, so you are actually doing pretty well.
And I say this as a sufferer (a messed up one).
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