A bit of a rant

Today’s ‘Behind the Seen’ is a bit of a rant. Apologies for this, but it’s something I need to get off my chest.

I tend to get more worked up about club football and spend far more time watching or worrying about the fortunes of Bristol City or Manchester United than England or Ireland (I know – having two teams might be weird but there’s a reason….) However, I’ve been following the World Cup pretty closely as it’s got going. The World Cup is a global event, one of those things that unites people across the planet, as well as a fascinating window into different cultures across the world.

Football generates huge emotion. You just have to watch the pictures of Scotland fans partying their way around Boston or supporters of whatever team kicking every ball, watching every move with rapt attention. I may not follow their team but I absolutely understand the emotion. That total absorption in the game, the frustration when one of your players does something stupid, the elation that comes from the last-minute winner. There’s something elemental, perhaps even pure about this emotion. On one level football really doesn’t matter. On another level it matters hugely. As that great Polish goalkeeper, Pope John Paul II said: “of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.”

Which brings me to my rant. What irritates me in watching these games is the adverts. Every one seems to simulate that emotion in the service of getting us to buy something. I sometimes imagine what it takes to make these adverts. They get a bunch of actors to pretend to be excited while watching the TV or at an imaginary game, leaping in the air to celebrate an imaginary goal. They get them decked out in face paint, wearing team shirts, waving scarves. And it’s all fake. Not only is it fake, it is there to sell beer or insurance or computer programs or credit cards. It is the commodification of emotion and precious life experience to sell us stuff.

Of course it’s not just football. Advertising seems to wheedle its way into all our most precious emotions and experiences to get us to part with our money. They depict moments of childbirth, the joy of parenthood, the beauty of a couple growing old together, all in the service of profit. Now I have no problem with profit. We all have to make a living and the companies and institutions we work for need to think about the bottom line. Yet this trend to take the most precious things of life and turn them into a means of making money seems grubby, demeaning and distasteful.

So why do these fake adverts about football emotion annoy me so much? It’s partly because they depict something unreal. Most football following is trudging to obscure away stadia through ordinary streets in some random part of the country. It is enduring anxiety, disappointment, boredom at dull games, frustration at your players’ inability to kick the ball in the right direction. It is driving home after a 1-0 defeat, with not even a goal to celebrate. The moments of joy depicted in the adverts when you score the last-minute winner are pretty rare. And you only deserve it when you’ve been through the trudging, the boredom and the frustration. To depict it in an advert as if that’s all it is to being a football fan is just telling a lie. It’s a shortcut to joy that doesn’t go through pain. It’s cheap grace. Taking that outpouring of joy when your team does something remarkable, making it generic and then using it to make money just seems plain wrong.

So forgive me if I leave the room at half time to avoid these irritating adverts. I would much rather watch the real thing in the stadium. Or even hope that one day, that might happen to a lifelong Bristol City fan.