Review
Books
Culture
Football
Identity
Music
Sport
Taylor Swift
4 min read

What makes fans tick?

Fandom’s remarkable fusing.

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Scottish football fans wearing kilts march down a street singing and waving their arms alogt.
Scotland's Tartan Army of football fans.

"A fat, sarcastic Star Trek fan: you must be a devil with the ladies." 

This put down of Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons neatly sums up a prevailing attitude to fans.  To be a committed fan is to devote yourself to a niche pastime; to be weird and nerdy and, simply, not cool.  At its worst, the fan becomes a fanatic, from which the noun is derived; an obsessive who stalks the object of their passion online and, at its most dangerous, offline. 

Times are changing, though, and the internet is chiefly responsible.  Where once fans could feel isolated and able only to relate to fellow afficionados slowly via the postal system, now they can find people who share their love in a handful of clicks and build relationships in real time.  A lot of anguish is spent on how the internet allows people to find extremist chat rooms where abhorrent behaviour is normalised; less attention is given to the wonder of being able to find fellow lovers online of Massey Ferguson tractors, Australian mullets or Rubik’s Cubes.  Many fans feel less alone online, building a new sense of belonging and purpose – a realisation that others will take them seriously. 

Yet experienced from the inside, a remarkable bonding is taking place, where fans not only fuse with others, but with the team itself.   

In Fans: A Journey into the Psychology of Belonging (Picador, 2024), the academic Michael Bond gives a perceptive and generous insight into the world of fandom.  There are Beliebers, Directioners, Trekkers, Swifties, Janeites, Ricardians.  For the uninitiated, that’s lovers of Justin Bieber, One Direction, Star Trek, Taylor Swift, Jane Austen, Richard the Third; though strangely one of the biggest bases of all simply goes by the title Star Wars fans.  Bond spends some time looking at the phenomenon of Michael Jackson.  Professor Gayle Stever has researched the pop star’s fans and found them, like many other fans, to be ‘normal people carrying on normal lives with functioning relationships and jobs, who just had this passion for Michael Jackson’.  Despite the discomfort of idolising a celebrity who lived, and died, with serious child abuse allegations made against him, they saw Jackson as ‘the target of racist abuse and unwarranted criticism throughout his career’. 

Fans often identify very personally with their idols.  Cosplaying conventions allow fans to reinvent themselves and Houston University studies have shown that people can ‘feel less lonely and less anxious in the face of rejection simply by thinking of a favourite TV show’. 

But what of football fans?  Many find the aggressive tribalism involved hard to accept.  I have observed young male fans of London Premier League teams chanting loudly at train stations in a way that made young women nearby shrink away, making me wonder whether my opening line from The Simpsons ought to be re-purposed.  The ritualised conduct of football crowds – the fist pumping, jumping and embracing at a goal, the verbal and hand abuse of opposing players and referees, and the chants that defy pre-match announcements about tolerance at games – can look bizarre and scary.  Yet experienced from the inside, a remarkable bonding is taking place, where fans not only fuse with others, but with the team itself.   

‘... the best of sport is not the earthy moment of victory, but the privilege of watching athletes tilt at divinity.’ 

Emma John

The deeper the love for a club, the greater the joy and the pain at success and failure.  It is a high-risk investment that many stake because it makes them feel so alive.  The peerless interpreter of football fandom, Nick Hornby, says that football is a context where watching becomes doing’.  Anyone whose leg has involuntarily jerked as a player reaches for the ball will grasp that. 

I wonder if some football fans who identify as Christian struggle with the secret reality of uncontrollable mood swings every weekend?  Should a win on a football pitch matter that much, when so many things are so much more important?  They may aspire to the whimsy of Ecclesiastes (there is a time to win and a time to lose, the author nearly said) but feel the coursing testosterone of Samson instead. 

God made us playful, and football is a disarmingly simple game to watch and play.  There is also breathtaking beauty in the movements of its finest exponents, like the choreography of Michael Jackson himself.  If we are called to life in all its fulness, isn’t this also a part of that fulness (even if some games are a stretch)?  

In recent interviews, Nick Hornby has said he couldn’t write Fever Pitch again, his pained love letter to Arsenal FC; middle age has brought a new perspective.  Writing in Prospect magazine (May 2024), sports journalist Emma John says: ‘I have observed many of my sports-loving friends follow the same trajectory…the best of sport is not the earthy moment of victory, but the privilege of watching athletes tilt at divinity’. 

At least, until the final penalty shoot-out, when for the diehard fan it’s absolutely all about the earthly moment of victory.

Review
Books
Culture
Ethics
Film & TV
4 min read

Small Things Like These: putting the spotlight on backstage goodness

What it means for a film to be good.

Kevin is a social theologian studying ethics and economics.

The gaunt face of a dishevelled man stares into the distance
A ‘stellar’ Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong.
Lionsgate.

Small Things Like These is a novella by the Irish writer Claire Keegan. Published in 2021, it compresses a remarkable story into 128 pages. Acclaimed widely by critics and readers, it follows Bill Furlong, a fuel merchant living in the small County Wexford town of New Ross in 1986, as Christmas approaches. While delivering coal to the local convent, Bill makes an alarming discovery. Memories of his childhood begin to press in on him and he finds himself in an existential crisis.  

Like her previous (very short) work, Foster, Small Things Like These is an understated book with a searing moral clarity. And just as Foster was adapted for the screen – in the astonishing Irish-language film The Quiet Girl – a movie version of Small Things Like These is now likely showing at a cinema near you. 

The movie is built around a stellar performance from Cillian Murphy. It would be criminal if his name is not featured among the shortlists when awards season comes round. Many of the film’s most arresting scenes feature close-ups of his face as Bill wrestles with the implications of his discovery and the phantoms of his past. The effect is that the film serves as an almost literal portrait of what it means to be a decent person.  

The story begins with Bill making a delivery to the convent. He sees a mother drop off her screaming daughter to the back door, where she is met and manhandled inside by a nun. The teenager protests passionately, but to no avail. The viewer understands that this girl has “fallen pregnant”, to use the Hiberno-English idiom that was so common in the twentieth century. She has been dispatched by her family to this institution to serve out the months of pregnancy and to remove any shame or taint from their reputation. Bill watches as the girl shouts out for her father, who is entirely absent.  

And, after a tense interaction with an aggressive nun, he goes home to his five girls and his wife, clearly shaken.  

A few days later, unable to sleep, haunted by memories of his own childhood being raised by a single mother, with an absent father, relying on the kindness of a wealthy local landowner, he begins his deliveries before dawn. As he deposits peat briquettes in the coal shed of the convent, he discovers a teenaged girl abandoned in the corner of the tiny, filthy room. She is in deep distress and Bill responds instinctively, wrapping his coat around her shoulders and bringing her inside to the convent.  

While the existence of Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes were not a secret in twentieth century Ireland, the exact details of their operations were not widely understood. With these two encounters, so close together, and his own personal biography as the son of a woman who was subject to exactly the same marginalising dynamics, Bill can no longer be satisfied to turn a blind eye to the oppression and alienation endured by those sent for reformation.  

It evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way. 

The film gathers momentum as Bill is forced to confront the way his mother had been treated for “falling pregnant” and the reality experienced by girls the same age as his daughters who were in a similar situation. In the midst of his existential angst, he finds little solace in the no-nonsense pragmatism of his wife who reminds him “there are things you have to ignore” to get on in life. He is taken aside by his local publican, a woman who has similarly scrabbled up from humble origins to establish a thriving business and cautioned to not make trouble for the nuns since “their fingers are in every pie in the town”.  

I will refrain from fully revealing every detail of the film’s plot. But this element of the screenplay – where Claire Keegan along with Enda Walsh – draw out the sense in which the oppressive ecclesial institutions were enabled and even sanctioned by the wider population is exceptionally well done. The film does not pull any punches on the evils that were committed in the name of churches in Ireland. Indeed, if anything, the presentation of the nuns veers too far towards caricatures of pure malevolence. But with surgical precision, it evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way.  

And that is the lasting significance of this film. Toni Morrison has spoken about how it can seem harder to write about goodness than evil. “Evil has a blockbuster audience; goodness lurks backstage.” In Small Things Like This, Claire Keegan introduces us to a hardworking small business owner who treats his staff well, a loving father who seeks to care for his wife, a man who lives down a back street of a provincial town in an overlooked part of a small island on the periphery of Europe. And in this very definitively backstage context, he is presented as heroic in his pursuit of the Good.  

We all fancy ourselves to be the one person who would stand up and oppose systems of oppression if we ever found ourselves enmeshed in them. Cillian Murphy’s depiction of Bill Furlong whispers to us that we likely are enmeshed in just that way and are choosing not to notice. Small Things Like These is a heavy film that somehow liberates. It reminds us that there is, within each of us, this appetite for seeing the Good and bring brave enough to do it. It is worth your time far more than any competing blockbuster.