Like everyone else, I still remember the first football match I ever saw. It was in The Hague in 1979, and Den Haag beat Utrecht 3-1. That day we discovered my brother needed glasses, because he couldn’t read the scoreboard. I can still see the Jehovah’s Witness who played full-back for Den Haag scoring the opening goal, and the young thugs charging around the terraces.
Going to football is one of the comforting rituals that carry you through life. It’s also one of the few pleasures that parents and children can share: in the stadium, everyone becomes nine years old again. To quote a poem by the Dutchman Henk Spaan: “A stadium is a monument to all fathers who are already dead/ A monument to the common man.” Nowadays, the common woman goes too.
Yet this ritual is poorly understood. The sports economist Stefan Szymanski and I have just published a new version of our book Soccernomics*, and two questions we ask are: why exactly do people go to watch football? And what makes them stop? The great myth is that most spectators simply have to go; that they are helpless, lifelong fans of one club, bound to it by blood and soil. This myth was nicely worded by Charles Burgess, journalist and Carlisle fan: “There never was any choice. My dad took me … to watch the derby match against Workington Town just after Christmas 41 years ago. I was hooked and have been ever since … My support has been about who we are and where we are from.”