The Pain Of The 21st Century Football Fan

From tweets to texts to BBC Sport live coverage pages the 21^st century football fan is the most informed yet. At any given moment he can know exactly what Piers Morgan is thinking (provided of course that against popular assumptions he does indeed have a brain) and what Steve-the-83-starts-for-Arsenal thinks about the quality of Dagenham & Redbridge’s defending for the goal they just conceded in their second round replay versus Preston.  But back in the day, of course (you know…that mythical time when Liverpool were actually good and all pundits used to be ex-Leeds United players), football fans did not have this. But what the real question is has all this modernisation so to speak actually made things-for a football fan at least-a bit crappy?

I will first start off with a bit of a case study…myself. Recently I, aided of course by up-to-the minute Sky Sports News tweets and the BBC Sport football page, managed to find out every Arsenal fan’s personal views (i.e. number of e’s in their ‘yesses’) on their FA Cup win. Facebook statuses with inflated amounts of emojis were written, tweets with equally ridiculous ratios of consonants to vowels were exchanged and the whole time I found myself filled with a quite the quite annoying self-absorbing anger only a jealous rival fan could possibly harbour. An anger which as a Spurs fan has been too frequent so far this season and many others.

But you see back in the day no-one really had this sort of problem. Of course this is not to say our father’s and our grandfather’s generations were not without a bit of Geoff Stelling here and there but they were not really subjected to the same amount of pain we are now nowadays. Spurs may have been still constant disappointments and Newcastle fans probably still wanted the chairman to go but one did not get the abuse or information as some in other circles call it they get nowadays. In the aftermath of the Arsenal win I was bombarded with tweets, snapchats EVEN e-mails on their win and I will admit it it did make the whole affair that tiny bit crappier.

The pain of the 21^st century football fan is a high one. Whether your team is doing well and you do not care what Clive a-lifetime-suppourter-on-his-way-back-from-the-game thinks about your new playing style or if your team is doing badly and you just don’t give two ducks what the rest of the world is thinking about you’ve got it pretty rough, sir. And it can only get worse…

That is, of course, if you are not one of Piers Morgan’s twitter followers who follow him for the genuine engaging football discussions he starts.