In football, either everybody is a plastic fan, or nobody is

There comes a point in every person’s consciousness when a mindless fad, no matter how ‘cool’ it may have seemed at some point, is revealed for what it exactly is – a fad. Bell bottoms lost their charm eventually, disco beats went from pulse-racing to nerve-grating, and even orkut was relegated to the ‘whatever’ bin, just like the term ‘whatever’. So it’s hard to figure out why the whole ‘plastic fans’ phenomenon is taking so long to bite the dust. Football matches may come and football matches may go, but the unfortunate souls who faithfully get behind the likes of Manchester City, Chelsea or any other cash-rich club continue to be derided as fake fans unworthy of respect or recognition.

The matter may seem superfluous at first glance, since it primarily concerns only the fans outside the regions from where these clubs originate; on the surface, the troubles of people cheering throatily for teams that have no connection to their nationality or culture might not even qualify as an issue worth pondering over. But we know that it isn’t as black-and-white as that. Sport has grown past national boundaries and cultures, and being a sports fan today is as much about appreciating the very fabric of humanity as it is about the colour of your skin or the place of your birth. When you call yourself a Manchester United fan, you are, in effect, declaring your admiration for the wisdom of Sir Alex Ferguson, the genius of Eric Cantona and the spirit of Paul Scholes. When you call yourself a Manchester United fan, you know that it means something.

Why, then, does it mean nothing when you call yourself a Manchester City or Chelsea fan? Most fans of these ‘billionaire’ clubs are young; they would likely have become loyalists of these teams sometime in the last decade. The reason for that is not hard to see: Chelsea started winning things of note only after the club was taken over by Roman Abramovich, while Manchester City, which has been on a buying spree ever since it was bought by the Abu Dhabi United Group, won its first Premier League title in more than 40 years last season. The ‘true’ fans of football never tire of reminding the world that the fans of these two clubs are guilty of jumping on the bandwagon of money and success. In response, the hapless Chelsea/City fans can usually do little more than whimper and lower their embarrassed gazes.

It’s interesting, though, how this ‘bandwagon’ theory applies only to the fans of newly successful teams. What makes the ‘golden generation’ of fans, the 90s kids who have grown up worshipping the traditional heavyweights, anything more than vulgar bandwagon-hoppers? What makes the Gooners and the Kopites and the Red Devils faithful better than everyone else? After all, the reason these glorious, traditional teams of yore have so much unflinching support is the same reason why Chelsea and City have fans – success. All a 90s kid could see while growing up was United piling on the trophies under the sage-like guidance of Ferguson; this was a period that saw the coach being knighted, for crying out loud – the team was that successful. Arsenal had a comparably prophetic coach in Arsene Wenger who helped produce adequately ‘beautiful’ football, Liverpool had its history (which, it must be said, comprised of a lot of successful League and European campaigns), and it felt appropriate for anyone remotely interested in the game to pledge his or her allegiance to one of these powerhouses. In short, anyone who’s a fan of any of these three teams owes his or her fandom to the fabulous results that the teams put up – results very similar to the ones that Manchester City and Chelsea have been producing lately, as a matter of fact. So objectively speaking, what is the difference between a United faithful and his noisy neighbour of a non-fan?

You become a fan of a team when you realize that it is capable of great success. Before the days of outrageous funding from the business netherworld, there were these few, seemingly God-gifted football teams that tasted a lot of great success, and to a casual observer, that success seemed to stem from passion and talent more than anything else. But it is an unspoken truth that money has had a role to play in each and every success story that has occurred in sporting history. That role may not always have been as obvious as it is today, but to pretend that long-running periods of abundance could have been possible without the assistance of the filthy lucre is naive in the extreme.

The thing that I find most difficult to comprehend, though, is why this is a bone of contention at all. Even if a team does use money to find success, why should supporting that team be an invitation for ridicule? Last I checked, doing everything in your power to make sure you end up on the winning side was a valid strategy. As long as you play fair, it’s the fact that you win, rather than how you win, that is important. And that’s precisely why Manchester City’s win last season, and Chelsea’s successes this decade, deserve as much credit as the triumphs of the traditional heavyweights in the ‘good old days’.

In the ultra-commercialized sporting world that we live in today, where figures like US$80 million are thrown around like they’re loose change, I can think of very few flattering adjectives to describe this whole trend of labelling fans of certain clubs as plastic or fake. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who is at a loss to comprehend why the trend has lasted as long as it has, or why it shows no sign of abating any time soon. It is an inescapable fact that the money being pumped into football teams lately has brought about success for those teams, and where there is success, there will always be fans. Genuine, 100% real fans. Calling them anything to the contrary is, quite frankly, the ultimate act of holier-than-thou snobbery, which actually is a lot more unpleasant than it sounds.

In football (or any other sport, for that matter), either everybody is a plastic fan, or nobody is. If being a fan of a successful team makes you a plastic fan, then I’m a plastic fan too (don’t ask me of which team). And I’m proud of it.