10 arguments of football fans that make no sense
With hundreds of millions of people watching football games every day, worldwide, football is easily the most-followed game on the planet, bar none. A wide spectrum of people fall under this range, including an ultra-nerdy segment that uses up a considerable amount of time in following televised games, reading sports magazines and forming opinions on world football.
This segment of fans is most active on social media, which is a convenient platform to obtain all relevant and interesting news. Often, they end up in heated debates, comment wars on social media and animated discussions about the game while hanging out with fellow fans. They have opinions on a wide range of footballing topics and are willing to express them freely.
Like any other similar critic community, however, many of these fans use flawed, meaningless and inaccurate argumentation during these discussions. The following is a list of 10 such common mistakes in criticism that they make.
1) We have more fans than you, therefore we are a better club than you
It is tough enough to define what makes a club good, without having to debate needlessly with another football fan whether the club one supports is better than some other club. Especially, just because one of them happens to have more fans.
It is a situational argument and does not always hold true. Any club’s real fanbase – the one that it mainly panders to, belongs to its locality. Therefore, it is the behaviour of these fans, who flock to the club’s home and away games, travelling with the team, which really defines the spirit of the club. Because they make the real difference to the club by helping to create atmospheres at home games.
The presence of the other fans worldwide is only felt when these teams are touring in preseason, raking in all the money from covering new markets. Otherwise, all that their involvement with the team amounts to is on social media and the once-in-a-lifetime trip to visit the club stadium for a home game.
Therefore, it cannot definitely be judged whether X club is better than Y on any logical scale, based on the number of fans it has worldwide.