I suspect we would all have answers to this that vary quite a lot.
Many people are great footy experts. They know all the positions, permutaitions and requirements of the various player in their tactical roles etc. I imagine those people get a great deal from a game based on that level of knowledge and get great pleasure from watching any good game regardless of who is playing
My brain does not work like that, i am primarily a club supporter rather than a footy nerd. My experience is a different one. No better or no worse in my opininion, I get my pleasure from seeing my tribe play well, even though I don’t fully understand what I am seeing.
Now, as I live in this footy wasteland that is Ohio (Other parts of the USA are much more interested in soccer than here) I am always confronted with the phrase that is intended as an insult “It’s just a bunch of fairies running around and kicking a ball”…To me, at least, this is the base line of where footy starts. If you are a neutral, watching the game for the first time, then that is what it is…It is a fair comment for them to make… It doesn’t become interesting until you have picked a team that you want to win for whatever reason.
This is the point where the game becomes beautiful. You have picked your side, and all of a sudden, everything comes into focus. It is only when you have a team to follow that every pass becomes important and all the other team members around the ball become more relevant. Their positioning, their off the ball running, even to a tactical retard like myself, it all becomes more clear.
In my own opinion, there are no other team sports that really convey this excitement and realisation as well as footy does. All team sports are about tribalism, but for me, the basics of the game are so obvious and simple that even a sports idiot like myself can see the overall merits of a good match.
Excellent question. Ohio. I can only give a personal view. I never much cared for football back when I was s small nipper, say five or six-ish. Couldn’t play it, didn’t watch it, and to my kid brain, didn’t see the point of it. Why can’t you touch the ball with your hands?
As I’ve gotten older, I realise that constraints can be a beautiful thing. Much of the beauty of the game is based on the simple constraint of not being able to handle the ball with your arms, limited to the use of parts of the human body that aren’t really designed for manipulating objects.
Second, the game is hard to play well. I’ve kicked a ball loads of times since five or six; I know how hard it is, which is why I have the respect for players that are good enough to make it look easy. Most pros make it look easy, compared to two left footers like myself, anyway.
Football can change in an instant, and while other sports also do too, there probably isn’t anything in other sports as profoundly satisfying or significant as a goal. I think part of it comes down to the fact that you don’t know if you’ll get one. Nil-nil draws would either be impossible or unthinkable in other sports. In football, scoring points is always a special thing. The same cannot be said of other sports.
Finally, the appeal of the game is near-global. Regardless of what we think about religion, politics, etc - most countries on this planet enjoy it. Alexei Sayle once referred to it as the new opiate of the masses, and to an extent, that’s true. Can’t help feeling he’s missing the point. How many other things unite people in quite the same way?
I’m going off on a tangent here, Ohio, but I reckon that when the worthies of St Mary’s formed a club for the young men of the area they probably chose football - as opposed to, say, rugby, cricket, tennis or golf - because it was cheap to set up, easy to organise, could be played more-or-less anywhere and at any time of the year, and occupied relatively large numbers of participants.
Perhaps, if they could have foreseen the tribalism, violence, corruption and obscene levels of lucre that would come to be associated with the Beautiful Game then they might have chosen something else.
Of course, back then, football wasn’t known as the Beautiful Game; we had to wait several decades for the man who claims to have coined that particular phrase in the UK: Stuart Hall, currently residing in one of Her Majesty’s prisons.
For me it is the movement. I cant get into rugby because it is stop start stop start but football flows when it is played well. It is also like a chess game and again, if played properly it is about the intelligence of movement. It is also very tribal. The team wear the same colours and hunt in a pack. The prey is the goal. Something very primal about it.
For me football in its purest form is something that can not touch by anything else, the release when Saints score is honestly like nothing else even now when they score and I see it I go apeshit, its pure but its being lost and its going.
My love for football is draining but not for my love of Southampton FC.
The differing of opinion is something else that’s brilliant as well.
