Imagined Communities

The first thing that struck visitors to the old Intrepid Fox rock pub in Soho was the sign on the door: No ties, no football colours. A pretty modest dress code, as London dress codes go, and it wasn't one I was ever in danger of breaching. If they'd banned leather jackets the place would have been empty, but football scarves? No problem.

Times, however, are notorious for changing. Cycling to work today, proudly sporting the new 2010-2011 Brentford away shirt, I was basking in an irrational sense of pride. The sun was shining, I had the excellent new Invalids tunes on my iPod as I raced over the bridge, and I was wearing the colours of my local team. But why should a thirty-year-old man feel proud at the ability to pull a T-shirt over his head in the morning?

Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities defines a nation as a community that is dreamed by a group of people who, by and large, will never know each other personally. Membership, as it were, is "perceived". We have a common history. We remember the same things, forget the same things. We can feel proud that a writer or a band or an athlete happens to come from our particular political entity. Nationalism feeds on the irrational. As A. J. P Taylor once observed: If men were sane, there would be no history.

If men and women were sane, there would probably also be no football. In many ways football clubs, like nations, are also imagined communities. We have our "government", the people who run things on a day-to-day basis, but much of what we understand as a football club revolves around memories, rivalries and shared myths (FA Cup Quarter Final 1989, a 4-0 victory over Fulham in 1992, promotion at Peterborough the same season) that can set even the most rational of pulses racing.

Why is it that we can feel offended by the existence of rival teams, without whom the entire game would be meaningless? And why did I feel immense schadenfreude at Fulham's Europa League Final defeat in June because of my disdain for our local rivals, and yet I get on very well personally with every Fulham fan I've ever met?

This is where the tribal element comes into play. As England's nationhood was shaped by defining themselves 'against' French culture and values, football supporters, too, are fond of defining ourselves in the context of what we're not, rather more than as what we are. Even the Brentford matchday programme now bears the legend: Real Football, Real Fans. But where are the football and the fans not real? It is tempting to answer: The Premiership, that rich breeding ground for fairweather fans and glory hunters who mistake a Sky TV subscription for a season ticket. But then, I know plenty of fans at that level of the game who are much more dedicated than myself. The truth is back in that pesky grey area, and grey is a lousy colour for a football club.

"In football," said Jean-Paul Sartre, "everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team."

But as I arrived at work and got off my bike, I remembered that we're pretty damned complicated ourselves.