The Great Transfer - Tribalism

Football, or any sport, is an interesting display of man's intrinsic need to form tribes and their rejections of others based solely on which tribe they belong to.

I am an Arsenal fan, owing to family history, and have been since I can remember; my first bib bore the rather trite epitaph 'I dribble better than Arsenal' and I was periodically bought new Arsenal shirts and kits as I grew up. I have always loved the team, shared in their triumphs and their shames, and it's basically a part of me.

Weird, I know, considering.

However, being an Arsenal fan comes with a series of provisos, automatic drawbacks to a quality, in roleplaying terms; you must have at least a passing dislike of all other Premier League, London-based teams, a healthy hatred for Tottenham Hotspurs' fans and an outright vendetta against Manchester United fans. So this means that, in spite of my better nature and intelligence, I automatically don't like millions of people which I've never even met.

It goes worse than that; I judge everyone who does support a football team on the basis of who they support. Many teams don't warrant a major judgement; any team outside of the Premier League gets an automatic bye and most teams in it do as well, depending on their history with Arsenal.

I don't consider myself a judgemental person when it comes to dealing with actual people; I always give them a chance in spite of their appearance, race, gender, education level, intelligence level, religion etc. etc....

Your choice of football team, though, in spite of the fact that the factors in who you choose will be largely familial or geographical, can instantly move you down in my estimations.

Which brings me onto my point; my tribal instincts seem to have latched themselves onto Football as a way of defining myself and others. Other people choose race, religion, appearance or wealth and the like in order to filter out those who do not need considering in their lives; I'd say that almost everyone has some kind of filter like that and almost no-one can claim to not harbour these prejudices within themselves.

Actually, in writing this, I'm almost glad that I've chosen something so trivial; you don't have to follow sports and the team you support are only one, very small, part of any person. If I chose religion, appearance etc. then I would probably be a bit of a bastard, but, as it is, I'm just applying bloke-logic in order to sate darker instincts.

The new season kicks off in earnest tomorrow; 9 months of agony, joy and the build-up of new bile against people I've never met.

I can't wait!