Only fans believe loyalty is a virtue in beautiful game

BEING a football supporter doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The lifelong unrequited love, the raw emotional involvement in meaningless abstraction, the sacrifice of time and money, the malicious glee in the struggles of rival clubs — all of these from the perspective of non-fans look suspiciously like the symptoms of mental imbalance.

It’s therefore not easy to say what aspect of fandom is most irrational, but it might be the delusion that the players see the game the same way.