The weekend comes and you have some small freedom. You love football, and thus you pay Sky Sports £50 a month to watch said game alone or at most with a small amount of friends. You do not go to a stadium and stand with other people, hang around the ground before and talk at length with anyone who will listen about formations, signings, other teams games etc. In short, you are the modern football fan.
None of this is your fault though. Unfortunately you have been subsumed into the cult of the individual, though help to escape is available if your truly wish. Cult's are only seen as ridiculous from the outside, they have their own internal logic which reinforces the cult behavior, so lets start with how you first got involved.
Football matches can be expensive. Most of the professional leagues are a struggle to afford for most without significant sacrifices (of sexual partners, long term relationships, other important interests), ticket prices go up above inflation most years and yet stadiums rarely get filled. Consequently the atmosphere has deteriorated at the game, you can't stand, you can't drink or smoke, and in places like the Emirates only the posh twats are left. In short, the product has got worse whilst the price has gone up, so you rationally stayed at home, and bought into the Sky ideal of sitting on the sofa and watching their adverts. Sky then pump their increasing revenues into the game, players get paid unjustifiably large wages, big media becomes a more significant and cohesive actor than fans as a unity. TV money has contributed to the deterioration of the live product, not least by scheduling games at ridiculous times, and constantly across the weekend (and week). Nobody asked for this, it just happened.
As a rational consumer, you aren't going to pay more for less, and thus you substitute for another similar good just like good neoclassical people should. You have separated out and lose the experience of collective action, of spontaneous unity and shared joy which football revealed to people every weekend for years. What you have forgotten is that football is not a product, and that is how they got you in to the cult, my friend. It is created as a spectacle by gatherings and organisations of people to enjoy in itself, the money is paid in to fund the collective aspirations and should be reasonable to the wages of the collective. Football can be changed by the people that support it, it isn't a bag of fucking crisps or razor blades which you can just substitute for something else, it is a living expression of unity. Football has resisted disunity for years, even when other realms of society have fallen away. These ideals have been retained in other countries, and they can be here too, though only with fan involvement.
There are affordable games available in the non league for those keen to wean themselves of corporate sofa football, however only when fans harry teams and leagues into improving the atmosphere and experience in stadia through re-introducing standing and letting people drink again not to mention lowering ticket prices will we see a change. Wages for players need to be capped, we can hardly kick sky out of the equation, however the more people that goto the ground the less watch there programmes, and it can be reduced to a reasonable amount of games. I would love it if sky changed first, however the leaders of cults tend to be dogmatic - far better to escape back to the real world and face up to these wider problems in the games which are turning people off.
Before you start whingeing that you live 200 miles away from your team and therefore cant get to the games etc, you might want to start asking why that is. It will almost certainly be because of current societal forces, however the response to this is not bleak acceptance and moving to London, it can be resistance and pride in where you are from, through resistance and pride in football. I can hardly blame people for being part of the cult, I am only trying to break you out of it. Unity is strength, leave the cult of the individual and join me and the others back in the lovely, cruel real world.
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