Tribalism taking the debate out of English football

This isn’t something that has happened overnight, it’s a gradual shift which has only just started to be noticeable.

Tribalism governs football like never before. Debate has always walked hand-in-hand with football, but now it’s becoming debate predicated on club loyalty rather than reason.

It’s a tired and worn-out example, but take the Luis Suarez situation; find me a Liverpool fan and I’ll show you a Suarez apologist, find me a Manchester United fan and I’ll show you an Evra sympathiser. In fact, show find me a fan of just about any other club…

Maybe this is something that I’m imagining, but now more than ever before it seems that opinions are dictated by party unity. There’s obviously always been that element to the game, modern football fandom is built on tribalism after all, but now it seems more pronounced. Are players in your team cheating on their wives, beating people in clubs, sexually-assaulting young girls? Yeah – well the chances are that it’s tolerated because those players ‘are one of your own’. I’m not passing judgement on those fans, it’s just an observation.

Nobody heckles Titus Bramble at Sunderland, John Terry and Ashley Cole are treated as heroes at Chelsea, you get where I’m going with that…partisanship is as strong as ever.

But on a more everyday level, it seems that the debate over aspects of individual games are also now included in this. Again, not something new, just a growth in the phenomenon. Away from the ‘that was a penalty/not a red card’ kind of debate – over which you of course expect bias – there’s now almost a blindness with which we view the game. Where the FA right to ban Mario Balotelli for four games? Would we even be having that debate if Manchester City fans didn’t defend their players until the last?

It’s as if the game has developed a persecution complex, and that this is the fans’ instinctual reaction to that. Every decision that’s made is an attempt to rob our team of something, all FA rulings are the product of some clandestine agenda, and every member of the press carries with them a bias.

It’s an easy scapegoat, but this is almost certainly a product of the media and the ubiquity of the game. Tune in every Saturday at 5pm – or Sunday at 6pm – and you’ll hear a manager attribute blame to someone for something that has happened in his team’s game. This is where it comes from, this is the by-product of the us-against-them mentality that’s cultivated by so many clubs – it eradicates the opinions of the fans, and replaces them with pre-prepared thoughts.

It’s not intentional of course, but it’s becoming increasingly evident.