What do we talk about when we talk about football? The ball. A player. A coach. A ground. We could answer the question not just by saying that we talk about a range of subjects, but by saying that we talk about football on a range of levels. In our last post, we wrote about the intense focus of media on matches, the action of football. In that sense, we focus on a single moment of action, or ninety minutes of these continual actions.
On another level we can move back from the action slightly, and take a longer-term view, talking about qualities and their significance for a team or a club’s strategy. The short time of a match, or a period of the match, can mislead our judgement. A player can put in a terrible performance. A manager can stumble upon the right tactic, despite his strategic shortcomings. Talking about a series of matches reduces the role of fortune. Here we see that supporters tend to supply most of the analysis, whether we talk amongst ourselves, write on a message board, or post on a blog. We try to identify the essence of a player or a manager: what we can say holds true of them when the outlying instances of individual pieces of action are taken away, and we can view their performances from a more distanced perspective.
And we can talk about the context in which this action takes place: the surroundings, the supporters, hope, anxiety, and despair. These are subjects can be hard to talk about in a way that feels adequate, and the retreat to stock footballing phrases is all too easy. When so many games are ‘must wins’, when players and supporters are always ‘desperate’ for success, when we’re ‘gutted’ once again following defeat, these words become mundane as we move further and further away from any real awareness of what it was we felt, and why it was we felt so strongly.But we think they’re perhaps the most important things to say about football, to explain it. The literal truth that football is just 22 men chasing a ball around is belied by this context. The collective emotion of a club provides the meaning to games, provides them with a purpose, explains why we can walk away from a defeat to Leyton Orient shrugging your shoulders and wondering where to go for a drink, and six months later walk away from the same result against the same side with a gnawing canker at the bottom of your stomach that you can't shake.
There is a mysterious alchemy that takes place at a football match.
To understand why football supporters find the game so important, you need to be within this context. There’s a paradox here at its heart: that football becomes overpoweringly meaningful to us because we allow it to; because we choose for it to. It derives its power over us from us. An entirely circular logic, absurd from without but inexorable from within: we could break the spell at any moment, but we don’t.
As the internet has facilitated and fed our need to talk about football, we’ve focused on ever greater minutiae, ever more analysis. It’s always there; there’s always one more opinion to read on whether Adam Murray will fit into Oxford’s midfield next season. And with this, we think two things have also happened. On the one hand, we rarely seem to have found a concurrent means of expression of the context of all this detail beyond our worn phrases, but on the other hand, the intense focus on every facet of Oxford United has created a community where we all share a detailed knowledge about all manner of things related to Oxford. It’s this community of shared knowledge that we think presents an opportunity to talk in a new way about Oxford, in a way that might let us explore not just its seeming, but its context and its meaning.
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