I find the tribalism at the heart of modern football’s fanbase sickening. The droll chit chat that masquerades as conversation between supporters of rival teams would not survive in any other emulous environment. It is small wonder that this banter is not the cause of a lot more violent episodes on match days. Ironic then, that this partisanship feeds football’s financial success.
The layers of irony do not end there, though. About 70 per cent of player fees in the world’s most successful football franchise (the English Premier League — EPL) comes from television rights. And a significant portion of this is from outside the United Kingdom. In other words, football fans pay the salaries of footballers in the EPL — in Africa’s case, largely through MultiChoice. Put differently, all the footballers in the EPL are employees of the hosts of couch potatoes and armchair football analysts.
Why then would a fan (an employer) suffer conniptions of anger and pain when one employee fails to pass muster on a gloomy weekend? After all, there is a bewildering array of such employees’ performance to choose from every weekend that the football season is on. My preference, therefore, is for good football — it doesn’t matter which team is playing it.
