At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, there are a number of interactive exhibits on social behavior. One such exhibit is spread throughout an entire gallery. It's a simple setup. On a waist-high post are two oversized buttons--one red and one blue.
There are four or five of the posts spread around the gallery, all within shouting distance of one another. A large screen is divided into two halves and keeps track of how many times the red button is pushed and how many times the blue button is pushed. For each time you press the button, you get one point.
Kids and adults begin to push the buttons, unsure of what it will lead to. When they realize that hitting the buttons make their "team"'s score go up, they press rapidly and begin to communicate with strangers pressing their same hued buttons. Observing someone furiously invested in hitting a button compels bystanders to adopt the same behavior with the adjacent, rival button. The other posts begin to populate as red and blue teams are self-formed. The team members--strangers who have never met, some young children, some grandparents--urge one another on loudly.
You now have pairs of people standing side by side, slamming buttons as if their lives depend on it. The button pushing is to no end. The scores, it seems, would continue to go up infinitely. The spectacle is something to behold. The exhibit is supposed to remind us how easily and arbitrarily rivalries and teams can form.
There is nothing fundamental about which team you align yourself with. Essentially, which button is open? Which stranger is yelling more loudly in your direction? That alone is the criteria for team selection.
It's unromantic to think this way, though. We like to think we pick our clubs because we identify with them on a meaningful, even spiritual, level. We pick them because we share values, beliefs, and overarching ideology. We pick them and they pick us; it is a symbiotic relationship. Ideally we are born into our clubs, in which case, they were part of us even before we came to be.
Not everyone is brought into the world with a vested interest in one club over the others. And so we each have a story of how we transformed into the crazed, delusional supporter you have before you today. Americans with European football allegiances are especially interested in "how did you pick your club?" stories since so few of us have generations of supporters in our families. I'll tell you mine.
In the suburbia where I grew up, my little brother played in a league where each team was named after a well-known professional club. I could easily have picked Ajax or Inter, but Chris made Chelsea so I rooted for Chelsea U-8s and then I rooted for Chelsea FC.
We like all kinds of origin narratives--football partisanship is no different. We like to know how our favorite bands form, where did our parents meet, what was your first job, and so no. We love to impose and derive meaning from coincidence and happenstance. It's a thrill to imagine that there was something fated about the selection of our clubs as there must have been with the selection of our soulmates. Whatever path (the more circuitous the more destined) led us to our fandoms is proof that we belong. I refuse to believe that Chelsea's coming into my life was anything but part of the master plan. If Chris had been cut from Chelsea he'd have played for Aston Villa. Where would I be, then? Certainly not a Villa supporter.
There is a more deliberate purpose to our real and imagined origin stories. In our heart of hearts we tell ourselves these stories with the hope that our origin story will be our children's. I have no dad and granddad who held season tickets in the Shed End. Instead, I have youth Princeton soccer. And so shall my daughter and her daughter after that. And, for them, there will be no questions of belonging because I will gift to them the greatest facet of identity within my power--baby photos clad in Chelsea jerseys.
And after a certain number of generations the story will become myth and it will be as good--nay, better--than the hooligan grandfather I once yearned for. In mining for these ulterior motivations in myself, in facing what could be a nihilist view of first generation club selection, I am actually strengthening the bond I have to my club. Martin Sheen said, "Love is not a sweet thing, but a terribly painful endeavor because it requires total honesty." If he is right, I certainly love my club.
The choices we make, not our inheritances, are what form our identities. Isn't that what the sorting hat taught us? It is the old, and wildly misconveyed, adage: blood is thicker than water. That is, the blood of the covenant (given voluntarily) is thicker than the water of the womb (from which you are birthed unwittingly).
I can't speak for all Americans, but I have a dread fear of being 'found out'. I loathe the label 'poser'. Would my Chelsea support stack up against someone who doesn't have to wake up at 7 AM to watch the match? Against someone who attended their first FA cup match at age five? I, like my forefathers before me, am determined to give my children what I didn't have: freedom from the tyranny of neophytism. What I have lacked, I will provide.
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