Scenario 1: The Unemployed fan
There is a ringing sound continuously playing out in the distance. Meh, just ignore it, it will stop eventually—and it does. Suddenly, there’s an epiphany: that’s the sound of the alarm going off. You quickly reach out for your phone… damn. The alarm went off a couple of hours earlier, but you could have sworn it was just minutes ago.
You are up now and you are cursing yourself. Same s**t, different day. There was no football last night and yet you couldn’t wake up in time. Obviously, it doesn’t help if you slept very late; exactly at the same time you usually sleep after watching football.
Even before getting out of bed, you promise to yourself that tonight will be the night you begin to fulfil your resolution to make full use of the off-season and get your sleeping pattern back on track. Yeah, right…
Scenario 2: The Employed fan
Your eyes are fixated on the laptop’s screen. Suddenly, your vision begins to narrow horizontally and the weight of the earth seems to have focused itself on your head as it slowly dozes down towards the keyboard. Zap! You jerk out of it, rub your eyes and yawn as wide as the horizon while trying to haphazardly cover it from your boss who is approaching you.
“Long night?” he asks. You just nod and hastily get back to work, wondering how on earth do you always end up sleeping late despite there being no football on the TV. ‘I will go home, eat dinner, maybe make love with the wifey and sleep right then,’ you pledge to yourself before seeing your code run into an endless loop and hanging your lappy in the process.
There is a long pause followed by a vehement shake of the head at the message that the Universe has just given you.
Scenario 3: The transfer season
The football season might have just concluded, but the painful transfer season is ongoing. The hotties in trend this season are James Rodriguez, Alvaro Morata, Diego Costa, Romelo Lukaku, Alexis Sanchez, Kyle Walker, Kylian Mbappe along with half of his Monaco teammates, and some more.
Among them, Mbappe seems to shine like the moon among stars on a full-moon night. Not even a single mention of his name contains an amount of less than a 100 million. What a time we live in, where a bloke who has had only one blasting season—albeit at the age of 18—is worth more than what a Ballon d’Or winner, Cristiano Ronaldo, was in 2009.
He might be supremely talented—and, oh boy, he is, just watch the kid and you will know what true love is—but that doesn’t change the fact that after just one great season, the money quoted around him is just as supremely inflated.
This is the recurring theme in every summer transfer window. There are always some really high-profile names in the mixer and a crown jewel among them. Last year was the year of the Paul Pogba, this year is crowned by Mbappe.
And if your team are linked with any of these pearls, then it is going to be a long summer for you. This is actually what happens: wake up, search for the player linked to your club, read all the possible news—which is actually repetitive in the first place—groan about how this player is not necessary or sing laurels about why he is, check news again repeatedly till you hit the sack at night and repeat the process again the following day.
This is what every fan does for the rest of the off-season. This or checking out Twitter every 5 minutes. And how can they be blamed? There is no football on TV, no means to vent the frustrations of daily life and channel it out through something completely unrelated to your personal life.
Football is that means to release the internal wrath and when it is not around, transfer season takes the mantle and saves the day. Even something as trivial as someone having an opinion that is different to yours is a chance to unleash the inner rage.
I mean, how dare does anybody do the same thing as you—forming an opinion, albeit different—and get away with it?
The truth is, for the sake of everybody’s sanity, transfer season is a necessary scapegoat to sacrifice. Fans might not enjoy it for the most of it, but it is essential to keep the wheel spinning. It doesn’t actually matter whether the player a team signs is good or bad—that is a debate for midseason—as long as some activity is going on.
That’s what people truly care about. They hate the never-ending cycle of rumours, but they despise it even more if they are absent because that’s what keeps their life ticking during the boring period of no-football time.
The Conclusion
‘Ah, the off-season beckons. Now I am going to restore my sleeping cycle and live a healthy life. Go to bed early and rise early and be totally efficient with my daily life.’ – Every football fan ever.
But the reality is depicted in scenarios one and two. So, why do football fans never get around to improve our sleeping habits despite there being no football? Habit. And scenario three: the darned transfer season that keeps you awake at night, spewing fury or oozing joy at the activities of the market.
Being a football fan is a truly wonderful experience in itself. It is one of the very few things in life that can influence one even when it is not in play. The life of a football fan during off-season is basically a sad attempt at being more productive, but they end up doing the same things that they did during the season—just in a slightly different way.
