The Beautiful Game

The relationship - if you can call it that - is finally over. It was dying a slow death anyway as both of us eventually lost the will to maintain any kind of regular contact. We finally got round to discussing us last night, at which point I jumped in and offered a white lie - that the distance was too great and we didn't really have enough time/ opportunities to see each other - as a decent and credible excuse for us not seeing each other anymore. The truth is slightly different, but at least with this explanation both of our egos stay in tact.

As dating is an art form - one about which I am pretty sceptical - so, they say, is football (...seamless...). As I sit on the couch (perhaps the longest time I have spent on the couch since I moved in, as I like to think I usually have better things to do than passively vegetate the evening away, and in any case our living room is usually dominated by A, my mildly depressed diversion-seeking lawyer flat-mate who sits for hours on end flicking from one appalling American comedy or gritty, life-replacing, morale-sapping drama to the next...) watching the football - and in the time in between games, the news - I am pleasantly surprised to see the relatively few reports of violence. Doubtless this is because of the huge police presence in Germany, but it really is refreshing to see fans, and especially England fans, behaving moderately well.

Football fanaticism to the extent I have seen it in England, Scotland, Spain, Italy, Turkey (need I go on?) has long been one of the phenomena of modern Western society I have never understood. It may even surpass racism for its level of incomprehensibility. Anybody who would want to physically or verbally attack another person based solely on the football team they wish to be successful, or even the team they manage or for whom they play, is frighteningly close to insanity.

Hillsborough; Heysel; death threats to Steven Gerrard and his family based on speculation that he might leave Liverpool; the murder of Andrés Escobar for scoring the own goal that knocked Columbia out of the 1994 World Cup; the sacking of Ahn Jung-Hwan by Perugia for scoring the goal which knocked Italy out of the 2002 World Cup... None of it makes sense.

Chanting - I can see why, at the ground, some would want to shout words of encouragement to the team they supported, but why bother chanting in a pub, hundreds of miles away? Because it creates a good atmosphere? Because it's fun? Because it encourages unity? I'm not convinced I really want unity with these neanderthals. As I look round, most of my middle class friends don't chant, and the ones who do, look - and, I sense, feel - a little out of place.

In addition, the emotive and provocative content of many of these chants baffles me: perhaps I'm guilty of taking the words too literally but I am in no doubt that many people honestly hate rival supporters and players. Why do I feel I can't take my future son to a game without him hearing a catalogue of profanity and indecency? A little conservative perhaps, but fuck it, politics is just another buffet...

It seems that, for many, football fanaticism really has become religion, and along with it come the seemingly inevitable tribalism and mortal evangelism that have somehow persisted through the millenia.

According to Riverbend, Muqtada al-Sadr has issued a fatwa against football and the World Cup - I guess this is just the other side of the same coin: a pedantic and uncompromising devotion set against an alarming backdrop of hatred and intolerance for all those who do not conform. I'd like to think though that he secretly gets one of his mistresses to dress up in an England shirt at bed time, you never know...