How to Enjoy the Premier League Without Being a Dick

Photo by Tom Johnson, graphic work by Sam Taylor

The top division of English football has its faults, but we’re actually living through one of the golden ages right now. The problems may be severe – ticket prices, Steve Bruce's face and the tedious superiority of the Man City Lego Men, but kids today don’t know how good they’ve got it. People should cast their mind back to the really dark days to remember just how bad it was. All the way back to 2004.

It’s hard to think that it was just a few years ago when everything was infinitely worse than it is now. This was post-gentrification football, and true, the man who did more to serve that goal than anyone else, Thierry Henry, was top scorer, but who was second? Yeah, exactly, Andy Johnson. It was a time of dull hegemonies, awful football, utter dross making up the vast majority of the league and Steve Bruce's face. Except it didn't look as much like an old woman's fat back then.

Now, we probably have more great players around than at any time since the mid-90s. We have a competitive league, most teams play good football and things are probably as unpredictable as they can be given the huge discrepancies in wealth. Instead, the problem is increasingly with fans. Not in the way that the FA seem to think, but instead people forgetting how to actually enjoy the game. In 2014, the Premier League is being wasted on the people living in it, and we need to change that.

Learn to Take It As Well As Give It
Look, I’m not saying that Emmanuel Adebayor’s celebration against Arsenal wasn’t the greatest moment in the history of Our Sport, and that a big part of that wasn’t the UCL-student-shouting-from-behind-the-bouncer reaction from the Gooner faithful, but football fans need to learn to stop being so thin-skinned. Sure, hurl coins at Theo Walcott if you want. Even if it is reacting to his “2-0” gesture. But don’t then use that as a casus belli to call up Stan Collymore and call him a "disgrace" on TalkSPORT. Don’t tweet about any perceived slight from rival players and end it in "#noclass." Francis Begbie might’ve glassed people for spilling a pint, but it was an excuse – he wasn’t actually upset about losing a drink. That’s not a good look.

Photo by Jake Lewis

But Definitely Keep Giving It
Just as teams only begin singing songs about the inferior opposition support once they have abandoned all hope of victory, there’s a reason that acts of violence and bitterness tend to accompany bad football teams. If Manchester United had hired José Mourinho, they probably wouldn't have ended up lobbing a flare into the Sunderland end in the League Cup semi-final.

It doesn’t always have to be acts of ultraviolence, but taking it out on others is just one of the many ways to cope with the misery that defines a large part of the football experience for most fans. Fill your boots: feel free to boo your team, you’ve paid your money. Feel free to subject your new signing to a volley of abuse on Twitter when you know full well he hasn’t had enough time to settle and isn’t getting the service. If you’re lucky, you’ll provoke them into an aggressive, ill-advised overreaction, and that’s what we all want to see.

Stop Pretending You’ve Seen More Than Like Three Shakhtar Donetsk Games
Whenever any club is linked to a foreign star from a new league, people have opinions, and that’s OK. But it’s not OK when everybody pretends to have intimate knowledge on the pressing habits of a Sporting Lisbon midfielder who only starts half their games. We should all be grown up and admit that there’s only so much football a man can watch, and we get jaded after a while.

There’s certainly only so much football we can really watch – you can do the slow Sunday recovery, slithering into the bar for the early kick-off, assaulting a hangover with a flurry of coffees, beers, cokes and shits, carrying you through the 3PMs, becoming a session around the late game and maybe lasting until the Spanish games later on if your venue is so inclined. In the modern age, that’s one of the great footballing experiences. But nobody is seriously looking at an individual player’s precise strengths and weaknesses, and even this is limited to big teams that get on telly (unless it's Osasuna or whoever have been lined up for Barcelona, Real or Atletico to maul that weekend).

We need to grow up a bit and admit when we know next to fuck all about the players Swansea have been linked to this window. The joy of the undiscovered signing out of the blue is being diminished – remember when, in 1999, everybody opined after the game that they always knew Solskjaer had it in him since they’d streamed some Norwegian league games a few years back? No, you don't, and that's exactly my point.

Photo by Jake Lewis

Stop Becoming Too Attached to Individuals
Andre Villas-Boas lost 3-0 at home to West Ham United. That’s really all there is to be said about his Spurs reign, and yet he inspired a fanatical loyalty among his devotees, and half the club’s fans will still be grumbling about how far back his sacking set them if Tottenham won the league next year. But what is it that sets him apart from the Sam Allardyces and Steve Clarkes of this world? Is there anything that stands out?

Repressed appreciation for homoeroticism isn’t the only thing that keeps people clinging to people, of course. Michael Carrick is not likely to get anyone thinking twice about themselves, but he has a bizarre cult determined to prove by any twist of logic necessary that he is one of the world’s greatest midfielders when he’s clearly shit. A nuclear holocaust would leave only the most resolute strains of bacteria and people still insisting Kagawa can be a great player if only he’s used in the right position.

Sometimes people fail. Failure is a part of what it is to be human – if you’re going to take to individuals, you have to accept their basic humanity and also the fact that they can’t always work out exactly how you expected. It will make comment sections and forum threads drag on a lot less.

Photo by Will Coutts

Be Prepared to Admit That You Basically Have No Idea What’s Going On
You can fancy yourself as a football manager, and sure, you might think you could make the right signings and name the right team selection, but we all know that the main thing holding everybody back here is that nobody outside the game has much of a clue what a football manager actually does.

Are the neat passing moves practiced by Barcelona off-the-cuff results of brilliant improvisation, or are they precisely choreographed training ground routines? There are cases for both sides. We also don’t know if that star’s mysteriously brilliant season that arrived out of the blue a few years ago was down to a tactical change or performance-enhancing drugs. We don’t know if our centre-back has handed in a transfer request because he’s really rejected the love from the stands or because he has a crippling gambling addiction and needs to pay his debts off.

We’re not all ITK. And even people who are don’t have much of an idea how football clubs actually operate in the main. But that only adds to the magic.

Photo by Jake Lewis

Stop Using Statistics
When Gary Cahill attempts to control a pointless hoof downfield from the other team and chests it into the path of an opposing forward, that’s a successful interception. When Yannick Bolasie shoots a tame effort from 30 yards straight at the goalkeeper, that’s a shot on target. When Tom Cleverley ruins a counter-attack by passing the ball five yards behind the wrong player, that’s a completed pass.

The game is far too complicated and anarchic to be measured by stats. The game that is most suited to them is baseball, the absolute antithesis of football, with its stoppages and clear objectives, roles and terminal boredom. English fans write letters to their MP when their local team experiments with cheerleaders. They reach for their revolver when they hear the word "soccer" and they laughed at @usasoccerguy for two minutes before realising it was shit and unfunny. Don’t let stats be the way the Yanks creep their way into the game.

Photo by Jake Lewis

You Are Not Your Club’s PR Department
The indefensible doesn’t need to be defended. Luis Suarez is a racist, and he plays for your team. Say it, it’s OK. You don’t need to want to have his contract immediately terminated, you just don’t have to compile contradictory arguments defending him. Adnan Januzaj is a diver. Frank Lampard votes Conservative. Jack Wilshere is a terrible human being. And it’s all OK, just part of the magic of who they are.

“You can’t pick and choose” is a mantra heard about everything from Scottish independence to religious fundamentalism, but in every case it’s a crock. You can – feel free, go ahead. You can hate someone as a man but love them as a footballer – it’s perfectly possible. Most people don’t, because we’re stuck in childish fantasies, bewildered beneath their gaze, and that’s fine too as long as your idolatry doesn’t lead you to dark places. If we couldn’t separate the artist from the art, then we wouldn’t be able to enjoy Elvis Costello or PG Wodehouse, and that’s a world that nobody should want any part in.

Follow Callum on Twitter: @Callum_TH 

For more football, check out our columns, Who Are Ya? and A Small Minority of Idiots

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