Why support a club when you can support football

All good things, they say, follow a certain format. A good book, for example, starts out with the acknowledgements, where the author recognizes the immeasurable contributions made to his work by his peers. In an effort to stick to the well- worn road, I’ll start out by saying that the article that got my writing juices flowing after a long hiatus was this one.

In the article (which fully demonstrates the near Shakesperean talents of Karthikeya Ramesh), the author describes how the romance in football is dead. How routine the champions have become. How mundane it is for the so-called ‘non-established teams’ to even bother trying to win any polished silver at all. Even hoping or trying for a win is an outrageous display of audacity!

Who could compare a random club from a random league to get anywhere near the big cheese of continental football? It isn’t bordering on sacrilegious, it is outright blasphemy for any team other than the two Manchester teams and Chelsea to even think of winning the Premier League. And that belief is reinforced by the fact that not a single team has been able to live up to the expectations their fans had made vocal on their Facebook statuses at the beginning of each season since the inception of Facebook itself.

Yes, the last time ANY team other than the ‘Big 3′ won the top flight in England was before Facebook was invented. Arsenal, in what was arguably their best season of all time, had clinched the trophy in 04, and since then, the tripartite struggle is the only thing that remains in what we so graciously call the ‘Premier League’.

Similarly, Europe too paints a depressing picture for the football romantics. I shall not go too much into the details (I believe Karthikeya’s article is too good to surpass, so I’ll let it do the talking in this regard), but I will make a bold statement regarding the so called ‘monopoly’ of football between an ‘elite’ league of clubs. I believe this is the season of the underdog.

I would like everyone to take a moment and remember what happened to Gaddafi and Mubarak. They were the undisputed rulers of their kingdom, but they fell harder than any god would. People can only take so much from the ‘bigwigs’. At some point in time, I believe there will be a storming of the Bastille, a slap on the face of the footballing bourgeois. I believe “there is a storm coming [Mr. Wayne], and when it comes, there will be no place to hide.” The meek shall inherit football. And I believe it will happen now. I believe that the clubs like Liverpool and Arsenal, who have nearly sunken out of the potential Champions league winners list, shall win this time.

I’m not anti- establishment by any stretch of imagination (my brand new Reeboks can testify to that), I am just bored. I could put it in a better way and call myself a football romantic who expects the unexpected and cheers on for an underdog in the face of adversity and hopes for a miracle when the others hopes are lost, but that won’t define me aptly.

I did cheer for Bayern Munich this season. I cheered for both Chelsea and Bayern the year before. And before that I was a scrawny git who couldn’t appreciate the true splendor of the beautiful game. But jokes aside, I am just plain bored. What do you expect out of this season? A win here, a loss there, two teams in the finals who have bought their entire squad with enough money to feed Africa and lift the Eurozone crisis respectively… End. I would yawn through the finals of the Champions league, even if my favorite team were clobbering my most hated one.

I remember writing a short essay for one of my English papers on the importance of sports in our lives. In hindsight, I feel my grades were inadequately high. My argument was based on ground more unstable than Ashley Young. I argued that sports inspires us to do our best. Ha! Our best?

They way I see it now, it only inspires me to walk to the nearest sports store, buy a plastic flag, wave it high, vent my spleen on some poor soul in the comment section and rejoice when the club whose bandwagon I have jumped on wins a tournament. Where is the actual ‘inspiration’? I don’t see a homegrown team that takes on the world, just like Celtic had. I don’t see a dirt poor team showing people that pedigree can’t be bought, only brought out with hard work, I don’t see inspiration in football, I see money and flashbacks. I am uninspired, and thoroughly bored out of my skull.

And that brings me back to the heading of the article. Which stand do you think I’ll be at when the Premier League results are out and the Champions League finals take place? My writer description clearly states I’m a Bayern fan and a Chelsea sympathizer, but I don’t want them to win anymore.

In fact, I actually want them to lose. Lose against all odds. Lose in the face of certain victory. Lose in a humiliating manner to minnows no one has heard of. For that is what I am supporting for now. I am not supporting a club any longer. All I want, is to feel the excitement that nothing in the world can bring but football. All I hope now, is that things are balanced once again. All I support for now, is football.