Why do we back Aston Villa when we get beaten back each weekend only to get up and stand behind our team for the next game? As of late it has hurt – hurt plenty. But regardless of our vitriol towards everything Villa at the moment, we back them. Why is this when it would be so much easier to don a Manchester United cap and scarf?
I think, in order to understand why we are who we are you have to look at our DNA. Not our Aston Villa DNA, but our human DNA. Since the dawn of time, or more specifically since we rose onto two feet, we have been at odds with most of our neighbours. We formed tribes, clans, city states, and countries and rarely did we agree wholeheartedly with each other. Here in Canada, the First Nations People, the ones subjugated by Europeans, are divided into 60 tribes and they have trouble agreeing with each other. Africa is made up of thousands of tribes and they fight. I suppose you could say religion is tribal and all about “us” and “them” – it’s in our blood. More locally, there is the Scotland/England argument and the Irish/England argument – divisions, and the fights between groups, are everywhere.
Once all the colonial finished, we had big wars. Once WW2 was over, we pulled away from our allies and made new allegencies. However, something had to replace the excitement of overrunning continents and fighting the righteous fight. Apart from regional wars which never really stirred anyone’s soul unless of it’s in your backyard and affecting you – something had to replace the blood stirring events of the past.
In my opinion, this is when sport really started to take off – the late 1940’s. Once the Romans conquered everything they could, they invented lions and christians. The Greeks had Sparta. Every civilization had some sort of “sport” to appease the masses during times of peace. Perhaps it was to relieve the boredom, perhaps it was just a better, more sanitised version of war – whatever the reason, it became popular.
Look at all the leagues in the world with all their followers. For me sport is for keeping the peace amongst the citizens. Now, let’s just look at football in England. Every town has a team and every town is at least 1500 years old (OK, I exaggerate, but you know what I mean.) In such a lojng period of time, ideologies and distrust of others set in.
When you think about it, the whole concept of civilization is a thin veneer that keeps us from gutting our neighbour – football rivalries are also part of that thin veneer. An excuse to metaphorically destroy our neighbours. Teams are within walking distance of each other and the friction and irritation is a constant each and everyday – one neighbour might be a fine, upstanding member of the community, but once he’s identified as a fan of Birmingham City, we detest them for that alone.
So, to be a fan of a football team goes much further than hats and scarves. It is an accumulation of hundreds of years of distrust and survival from a neighbouring town . The fiefdom down the street. Years of survival of the fittest. Us and them.
Nowdays the rivalries are played out on football pitchs rather than open warfare, and we back our team because we have backed our town for centuries and our town is our team – we feel it belongs to us. So come hell or high water we fight, with the team a metaphor for our history.
With war, we join hands with our neighbour to defeat a common foe. With the World Cup, we join hands with our fellow national football fans only to fall back into tribal modes when the league starts up. As long as there is food at Sainsbury’s, football will feed our need to beat the opposition and keep that thin veneer in place. When the food disappears, football won’t help us one bit.
We’ll just be back to rivalries again.
The Author
