I have a friend, a left-wing artist, who perfectly embodies the prototype of the type of person he has decided to be: long hair, beard, shorts, various tattoos and an elaborate anti-system discourse that draws on a bibliography that is difficult to access, whose secrets he gives to his interlocutors as if they were revelations that the powers that be fight to hide from us. He has made himself like the writers who draw a character: every detail of his image and every word he speaks responds to a careful choice that fits perfectly with the role he plays in life. In him everything has to match what he intends to offer to others. However, he has a problem, which he confesses in the tone with which others reveal that we do not control our drugs or that our virtual sex has gotten out of hand: he is a Real Madrid fan. I try to reassure him. He can support the club managed by Florentino Pérez and take The Capital under his arm, visiting exhibitions by Marina Abramović and denouncing the excesses of oil companies in the Amazon.
I don’t think the team you support describes you as a person. On the contrary, most of the time it’s not a choice, but an inheritance. Like blue eyes, baldness or accent, your club will determine your identity only to the degree that you let it. Often, in fact, our colours as fans are an anomaly in our overall worldview. My friend smiles with satisfaction when he hears me argue and tells me that some of the best memories of his life are from when he went to the Santiago Bernabéu with his father. Listening to him, I think it would be sad if he didn’t continue that with his son.
The German film Weekdays are coming The film tells the story of Jason, a boy with Asperger’s syndrome who, unable to understand that you are born into a club and not having one yet, decides to choose the colours to support based on certain criteria: a sustainable stadium, anti-fascist fans, players without excessive colours on their boots, etc. To do so, he visits all the German professional football stadiums, and several European ones, with his father. The film is based on a real case, narrated by the father, Mirco von Juterczenka, in a book. It is a beautiful story of filial love with football as a background.
So, can you choose the colours? At the beginning I argued that no, that in most cases they come as standard. But in reality I was referring only to the club that really You care. We live in a globalised world where today’s fans support their first team with other supporters, either from the same league or from other championships that they follow more or less continuously. That’s why young people today don’t feel ashamed when they say they support three or four different clubs, nor when they change them over the course of the seasons. Simon Kuper says that today’s fans are polygamous and intermittent and that the clubs they support are for accidental reasons, in contrast to the strong reasons that determine the roots of the classic fan (basically family and geographical). I agree with him only in part. I think that today’s fans have a main team and others that they like. The latter are merely celebratory, but the main one, the one you love, is the one that makes you suffer. We only cry for the club we love and we don’t choose that one, just as we don’t choose our parents or where we were born.
But we do decide our sympathies and they describe us as people. It may be unfair to judge someone by the team they support, but not by the teams they support. Those colors that we follow out of the corner of our eye are like the dots of those hobbies that when you put them together with a pencil give you an image. And that image is a self-portrait for which we are responsible, like listening to Kenny G, juggling or wearing boat shoes.
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