Fever Pitch

"Just because it sets the standard for writing about football that isn’t just statistics and ‘this is who won the FA Cup in 1918’. In about 1990 there was this sea change in the way people expressed themselves about football – more emotionally. Nick’s book sets the stall out for that. It shows the inner life of the football fan and describes how men can be thinking about football all the time – that it’s always there, that it is the backdrop to your thoughts if your team is about to play an important match. It’s very easy to read and very easy to connect to if you’re a football fan. I support Chelsea and I don’t like Arsenal. They were managed by George Graham at the time [1992] and were just the epitome of victorious dullness, so it’s a considerable achievement of Nick’s to get me to empathise with him."

"Yes, so far we haven’t said very much about the fan’s role. Of course, when it comes to professional sport, the whole thing rests on the fans, and people who pay to go and watch. I picked this book, not just because it’s a terrific book—it’s largely a personal memoir, with the fate of the Arsenal football team through the 1970s and ‘80s as a kind of backbone upon which to hang Hornby’s story—but also because it highlights the peculiar nature, the kind of obsessive but also accidental nature, of sporting fandom. Sporting fandom is very interesting philosophically: it’s a case of partiality, partisanship, valuing something when you can see that what you value isn’t going to be valued by other people. Some philosophers have difficulty with the idea that something can be genuinely valuable for one person, when it wouldn’t be for another person, even another similarly placed person—somehow what’s valuable for you is partly down to you, to your committing to something, your deciding you’re going to be a certain kind of person. There’s a natural philosophical tendency to want to try and explain away the possibility of such partiality. But if you think about football fandom, or fandom for any kind of club, it’s difficult to deny that, for many people, some of the most important aspects of their lives are tied up with their partisan enthusiasms. Hornby explains how it was almost an accident he became an Arsenal fan. He was living in Maidenhead, and his parents were separated and his father wanted to take him somewhere on Saturdays; he could have easily gone to Chelsea or Tottenham, but he went to Arsenal. At his first game he was hooked, he had an affiliation, he wanted to be part of this thing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One of the interesting things about sporting fandom is that it’s valuable, it’s important for you, you don’t think there’s anything irrational on your part, it is genuinely important for you that Arsenal win. But, at the same time, you can see that it’s quite symmetrical: the Spurs fans are just as rational, serious, proper people as you are, and yet they feel just the same way about Spurs that you do about Arsenal. My view is that the attempt to remove partiality, partisanship, agent-relative values from normative philosophical theory is misguided: life would be much thinner, unrecognisable, if people didn’t commit themselves to certain values, enthusiasms, decisions about what’s important, even when there’s no imperative for somebody similarly placed to take the same view. Life wouldn’t be the same if we didn’t have our personal commitments. But, at the same time, sport makes it clear that you shouldn’t want to impose your personal commitments on other people. Some idiotic football fans think it’s a consequence of their supporting Arsenal that they should despise, disapprove, look down on Tottenham fans, that such people are somehow morally inferior and misguided. I think that’s a small, and rather stupid, minority. Most football fans can see that these other people have just as important a claim on all of the good things in life as they do. That too could have more general moral significance—we shouldn’t try and wipe out partisan commitments to your school, your village, your family, your country, but we shouldn’t let that cloud our minds to the fact that we have no greater claim on important things in life than people on the other side. Yes, but is he lucky or not in that respect? He’s an extreme case, and as he says in the book at various points, he keeps getting introduced to people as, ‘here’s a fellow Arsenal fan.’ But most of them turn out not to be real fans: they just look at the score on Sunday mornings. That’s not what he means by being a fan. It’s pretty clear from the book that the extreme commitment and dependence on Arsenal is making up for other things in his life. Hornby’s commitment to Arsenal has an emotional intensity that isn’t shared by many other more part-time fans. Stephen Mumford, a philosopher at Nottingham, has written a book which is a plea for impartial sports appreciation. He thinks that the fan is being blinded to the pleasures, the aesthetic pleasures, the pleasures of appreciating tactics, the pleasures that are open to a non-fan, somebody who watches the game just to appreciate the finer points of the play, and doesn’t really care who wins. I’m not sure I agree. As I said, I think life would be thinner, much thinner, life would be pretty much unrecognisable if we didn’t find ourselves siding with groups to which we have found an affinity. Sometimes we don’t choose them, our families, our schools, our countries, but sometimes we do—our fellow hobbyists, people who like Mississippi Blues, people who like certain kinds of philosophy—and we root for our team. To feel that life would be better if we didn’t become partisan and tried to see everything from an unengaged point of view, is the wrong way to live. At the same time, we shouldn’t feel that our commitments should automatically have priority over other people’s commitments."

"It’s not depressing! It’s very funny and was also almost the book that started this all off. Actually, the book that started it all off was Pete Davies’s All Played Out . That came out in 1990, and has been called the John the Baptist to Nick Hornby’s Jesus. Because when Pete Davies’s book did well, publishers realised there was a literate football fan audience out there, and then Nick Hornby came and proved it with a vengeance in 1992. It was just when memoirs were coming into fashion, about the same time as Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? And you could say that Fever Pitch really launched the genre of serious football books. Nick Hornby doesn’t revel in, ‘Oh I’m such a football geek, isn’t that funny?’ He treats it as something suspect. And he describes how he uses supporting Arsenal to escape his parents’ divorce, problems with women, the question of what to do with his life, and lots of things like that. It’s also a bit of a social history of England from the 1960s through to the 1980s. And nobody had written a book like it – it was completely original. Nick Hornby was a not very successful, lower-middle-class bohemian, and when he was telling friends at the time, ‘Oh I’m writing a book about being an Arsenal fan,’ his friends all thought, ‘Oh God! Poor Nick.’ Nobody expected this book. It’s completely honest and it’s very funny. The only problem with it is that it’s a little bit formless: It’s a book to dip into, rather than to read through. It doesn’t quite have a narrative, but every little bit is brilliant. There are definitely moments of recognition. I’m not an obsessive fan of one club, and I hope I haven’t used football to escape life. But there are definitely strong moments of recognition, of football as this place of safety. Life is complicated but when you’re a football fan you’re gathered with others who are like you, and nobody judges you. It’s like being a member of a family, where there are no standards, where the only criterion is, ‘Are you an Arsenal fan?’ and then you’re accepted. Outside the Arsenal stadium life is scary, you have to be adequate, but as a football fan you don’t have to be adequate and that’s a great joy. What I’ve discovered more and more is that when you watch football and support your team, it is all a game. And that’s a terrific release, because as adults we have children and responsibilities and pressures, but when you’re just a supporter, you don’t."