
There is no place for the Dialectical Method in football.
The rabidly tribal football fanatic will, however, engage lustily in argument and lose many hours in vociferous debate. But she is, more often than not, blinded to any reason by the love of her team. There is no room for unemotional sterility. If you are going to enter the lists of a football discussion, your primary objective is usually not to be enlightened by the bon mots of your interlocutor. The whole point of a football argument is opposition. It thrives on antithesis. One fan wants their version of reality to vanquish another fans version of reality. That’s the antagonistic nature of football. You pick a side and you support that side, come what may. The tenet of your contention is your team. Even if, in a genteel moment of weakness, you might concede your opponent has a valid point to make, you will never cede that point to them. That would be as good as them ( and you can’t get more adversarial than referring to your opponents as the pejorative “ them “ ) drawing first blood. That would be akin to going one nil down in the early stages of the first half before you had time to settle in.
Football is all about assertions. It is not an arena where shrinking violets flourish. Even the most sensitive and gifted players, preferring to calibrate their football prowess via their little grey cells rather than the thuggish brawn that might get them locked up in a cell, are not immune from being assertive on the field of play. They have to dominate a match and the circumstances of that match in order for their artistry to gain access to a canvas free of agricultural oppression from any opponent who wants to subjugate with his intimidating physical heft. Such poets of the Beautiful Game are no effete, consumptive Keats’, gasping for an inhaler and a caress of Mummy’s comfort blanket. Rather, they are muscular Hemingway’s on the look out for the next bullish centre half to slay.
The same conditions prevail in the gladiatorial colosseum of football argumentation. Football debates held between fans of rival clubs- even between fans of the same club- are fuelled by not only a partisan loyalty to the team you support, but to whoever your favourite player might be in that team. There is no escape from the partisan pathology of the football fan. She might not argue that the club strip is black when it is, in fact, white ( there are some boundaries and limits which act as a Cordon Sanitaire in the sociological and cultural conventions of The Football Argument and one of them pertains to club colours: for example, it is unlikely a Rangers fan will argue that his club shirt is green and white to a Celtic fan, and vice versa, simply to score a point. Football fans are churlish and petty, but they do maintain some entrenched and sacrosanct scruples about some things ) but if she feels that her integrity is being undermined, or if she regards an antithetical opinion to her own challenges a fundamental shibboleth of her club’s existential being, then she will , almost against her will, retaliate with venom and forthright spleen. If not always in a manner that is becoming of eloquence, respectful decorum to the polite etiquette of the Agora ( or, as it is known nowadays, “ The Pub “ ) or magnanimous chivalry.