It’s gone too far, and somehow this exploding cult needs to be reined in. I’m talking about the way supporting football clubs, in particular those in the English Premiership, is becoming less a hobby and more a means by which people are beginning to identify themselves. The hysterical coverage of the game is one of the main propellants for this trend. For example, the recent encounter between Arsenal and Manchester United was presented as a showdown almost equal in tension to the Cuban Missile Crisis, with managers Wenger and Ferguson standing in for Kennedy and Khrushchev in this game of brinkmanship. Meanwhile the nuclear option was epitomised by that surly prima donna, Roy ‘Keano’ Keane, with his promises of all-out retaliation if the enemy makes a pre-emptive strike on the battlefield.And with Sky Sports News having to pad out a 24/7 schedule with rumour and speculation, it’s hardly surprising that desperate reporters became amateur Freudians, as they probed the managers’ mental armature for signs of potential weakness.All of the above could be dismissed as mere commercial hype if its culture of belligerence and language of warfare weren’t seeping into the wider society. This (literally) hit home when a friend of mine, a zealous Manchester United fan, was engaged in an “altercation” with some Arsenal “supporters” after the aforementioned match. He was presumably chosen because his yelps of triumph grated on their nerves. Thankfully, it wasn’t that serious–he received what might termed in the Irish vernacular as “a right box”–but the fact that punches were thrown outside a Dublin bar because of a football match in London bewilders me. First, sheer geography means that an Irish supporters’ choice of team will always be somewhat arbitrary (although there are few fans of teams occupying the lower rungs of the Premiership). It’s not as though these fans grew up in the shadow of the stadium, with the chants ringing through their childhood years*. Distance doesn’t appear to cool their ardour, however.Second, following the Sky ‘Revolution’, the major football clubs operate according to the same logic as other public companies, answerable directly to their shareholders. So the fanbase exists merely as a resource to be exploited–which makes some of the supporters’ ovine worship of the corporations’ expensive assets all the sadder. It also makes the rivalry between club supporters almost inexplicably beside the point–it’s like, say, someone who buys their petrol from BP getting into a fight with a Vodaphone customer because the COO of the former made a disparaging remark about the latter. That’s pretty much sums up the Wenger-Ferguson rivalry–a pantomime animosity that veils the financial cogs whirring behind all the talk of passion and loyalty to the club.But the poor fans still don’t seem to get it. While the upper echelons of the club executives secretly mock their cash cows (think of the Newcastle United executives caught on film sneering at the lumpenproletariat that comprise the Toon Army), the paying hordes lap up the preheated rhetoric and add their own ugly spin. For example, alongside the glossy paraphernalia and pricey kit that constitutes official merchandise, there is a grey market of fan-generated unauthorised products, the spirit of which centres not so much on love for one’s club as on a simmering hostility towards its opponents. For example, a Man U fan might want to buy an anti-Scouser T-shirt with the hilarious slogan “Kill All Dippers” (obviously Man U fans, unlike their supposedly larcenous Merseyside opponents, are possessed of a righteous work ethic.) Wearing such a T-shirt, a fan can mingle with his fellow supporters (well, he wouldn’t want to be in the visitors’ stand) and launch into a heartwarming ditty along the lines of:Build a bonfireBuild a bonfirePut the Scousers on the topPut Man City in the middleThen burn the fucking lot”Afterwards, wrenched from the oceanic consciousness of the baying mob, a sheepish individual might try to rationalise this absurd taunting as harmless ‘banter’. I suppose in the run-up to, say, the Yugoslav civil war Bosnian Serbs engaged in similar light-hearted ‘banter’ about their Muslim neighbours. Before you start accusing me of ‘political correctness gone mad’, I’m not suggesting hate-filled terrace chants will lead to civil war in the North-West of England, but it might cause someone to get a knife in the gut at a railway station on the way home. Liverpool manager Bill Shankley famously quipped “Football is not a matter of life and death. It’s more important than that.” Unfortunately the humour underpinning that quote is lost on some people. For them–God help us–it’s simply a statement of fact.*Of course supporting a club through consumer choice rather than geographic imperative is a phenomenon not just confined to Ireland. Manchester United is sometimes mocked for having a large number of fans in London. But even the nickname for this group–the so-called Cockney Reds–is not quite accurate as it fails to acknowledge the large slice of the pie accounted for by middle-class supporters.