Sports fans are rarely shamed for being overzealous

Have you ever loved someone and got nothing back? Next question: was it really so bad? We all feel things for people who don’t even know we exist, and the experience is often enriching. For me, David Bowie’s life held meaning. If the Thin White Duke did not rate as your personal companion, then our late Queen almost certainly did; or, if not her, then what about Walter White, from the TV drama Breaking Bad, since we love fictional characters too? Walt saw me through my divorce; and we enjoy these relationships in private. Sometimes we meet fellow fans, and then, as the cheery Michael Bond points out, ‘one of the incentives for being part of a fandom is that you get to do things with others’.

Bond sketches the psychology of belonging very lightly in his book. Why is it, he asks, that sports fans seem to get a free pass when it comes to chanting, dancing and face-painting? (I’d like to see Trekkies trying to get away with such ebullience in public.) Next, he notes that sport is a zero-sum game – ‘if I win, you lose’ – and this leads to un-reasonable love for one’s team, and unreasonable prejudice towards one’s opponent. But having begun with such promise, Bond does not connect these observations, and so fails to convey why his subject is important.

So let’s do his job for him. Fans are a species of tribe, and – this is important – tribes win respect the more tribal they are, which is why sports fans are rarely shamed for being overzealous. ‘Their commitment to the cause is expected, even applauded,’ says Bond. Tribal behaviour is exciting. It’s had us building civilisations and spilling each other’s blood for more than five millennia.