Since my childhood, watching football games doesn’t appeal to me. Whenever I sat to watch a match I just felt bored, I
was wondering why all those around me are so enthusiastic and taken by the match and why they waste a great portions of their time and energy arguing and fighting over which team is worthy of wining and which player is the best. Each time someone asks me about a single match or invites me to join him watching one and I tells him that I am not a football fan he would look at me with wide eyes as if I were an alien and asks me a lot of questions requiring me to justify my bad position. Sometimes, I don’t know if he feels sorry for me or wants me to feel sorry for myself.
I never realized the real reason behind this kind of irrational addiction until recently. With no judgement of football enthusiasts, as I believe everyone is free to lead the life he deems perfect. Let’s take this as a trial to understand the reason behind this kind of affinity.
It is all starts with the desire of everyone to feel belonging and loyalty. As natural desires, they need to be fulfilled some way or another. When a young adult or adolescent starts watching games and finds some beauty around it, which is entirely ok, and forms opinion about a single team he perceived as the best he starts to act as advocate for this team which represents -for him- his own opinion and ability to judge, or as he finds everyone else picked a team to support he would pick one for himself. On one of theses scenarios or another, with time this person desire for belonging and loyalty are fulfilled. And the team he supports becomes a part of his identity. It gives him a false sense of self and this is why he feels pride when his team wins and resentment when the team loses with no single real effect on his personal life. He takes the victory of his team as his own and when his team loses he feels sorry for himself. He couldn’t see what is wrong with this because it is the state of everyone else, and he get surprised when he meets someone isn’t in the same state.
The more strong affinity to a sports team in someone’s identity the more other aspects of his identity fade away and the less he is concerned with real matters that are directly affect him. to realize to what extent this affinity can be powerful and dominant and how it controls the masses watch how certain matches turn into massacre specially in developing countries where people are less educated and cultured.
There are many irrelevant things that we can incorporate into our identities but the most powerful and dominant one is affinity to a sports’ team, yet it is the most futile.
I believe bringing awareness -on both personal and collective levels-to the fact that sports affinity becomes a part of personal identity will help alleviate its effects and make individuals more able to free themselves from this falsehood.
