Euro 2012: Of Football, Girls and Crushes

The ad in question

Even while football fans in India are many, the percentage of women football fans somehow tends to falls on the lower side. Of course, there are girls and women who tend to base their football knowledge on the basis of a certain Portuguese, a couple of Spaniards and a few Italians and a couple of Germans. Not that these guys don’t command veritable position when it comes to their soccer-playing acumen, but the fact that most of these above-specified girls rank looks more than professional acumen tends to dampen the footie spirit of even the most hard-core female football loyalist.

The underlying premise behind exhuming this point is the forthcoming kick-off of the Euro 2012, and particularly, a promotional ad that was premiered by the broadcasters – Neo Sports. Though quite chauvinistic in its depictions, the ad however is not quite wrong with its intended message which mainly talks about girls focusing on the aforementioned Portuguese player as their motivation to watch the game, rather than the sport itself.

Someone had once put up a status update on their Facebook account talking about girls focusing only on well-known names didn’t merit to be called as football fans. The status update can very well be correlated to the aforesaid statement and be put down as being one of the many quixotic fancies of most girls. But isn’t passion for a particular sport also quixotic in a certain way making us loyalists forget everything beyond the existence of the sport itself?

While it isn’t expected of non-followers of football – especially girls in this context – to know everything about the sport immediately after they start watching it; just watching a sport and a team for a bunch of guys, isn’t rational enough. And even amongst the ones who follow this particular methodology of fan-following, how many can easily accept it to others that they do it in this manner? Not that there is any gauge to monitor someone’s fandom, but in a scenario where a group is discussing an important sporting event, what will these pseudo-fans discuss and for how long?

Perhaps then it wouldn’t be wrong to categorise this sect of people as hypocrites – harsh though it might seem – for they can neither be true to themselves or to others. For athletes and sportsmen in different sporting paradigm, the presence of fans is a very vital aspect that drives them, at times becoming their raison d’être, after personal satiation, in their field of proficiency.

Crushes on sport-stars at times are inevitable – no one is completely immune from having those fleeting moments of infatuation. But where crushes can be one reason for a person watching a player, they shouldn’t be used as a cover-up to hide the fact that one cannot stand the sport itself.