Here's an article from The Times, I've posted the full thing as the paper has a pay wall and it can be a bit of a bugger to try and read it via a link if your not a subscriber. ( Which I'm not by the way. ) THE GAME DAILY | MATT DICKINSON april 24 2019, 12:00pm, the times If even misery increases our loyalty then it is no wonder fans return each season matt dickinson, chief sports writer please log in to view this image “Loyalty, at least in football terms, was not a moral choice like bravery or kindness; it was more like a wart or a hump, something you were stuck with.” One of many quotable lines from Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, that classic of football obsession, has been stuck in my head in recent days, along with the constant reminders from Queens Park Rangers that the “Loyalty Window” is about to close on season ticket renewals. At many of the 92 English league clubs, these are surely the worst days to be a fan as a season of mediocrity dribbles to its end, yet already the demand comes for the next campaign. Sign up for more frustration! Give us more of your cash to pay off the debts! (As they don’t say on the emails/adverts/tweets). But what are you going to do? Slice off that wart? Can’t be done. Inoperable. Walk away and never return? Well, a decrease in QPR attendances of more than 20 per cent since relegation from the Premier League in 2015 suggests plenty have managed to find alternative life at weekends. But, heck, maybe it is in the blood. Maybe it is the one thing that keeps family and friends together on a Saturday afternoon, sharing precious time and experiences. Perhaps those Oxford University anthropologists were right a little while back when they explained how even misery binds fans to each other, and to a club. Relegation, humiliation, heavy defeat were just as important as euphoria in causing “identity fusion”, according to the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology. They were right, of course. Football’s enduring and remarkable mass popularity proves it; as do so many self-mocking chants revelling in hopelessness and notoriety. This bonding is an extraordinary process, because it even extends to an utterly perverse affinity with where you sit. For us at Loftus Road, that is a few yards in front of a man with alarming similarities to Harry Enfield’s most intensely irritating character, with his catchphrases of “You didn’t want to be doing it like that!” and “Only Me!” The infuriating torrent of know-it-all remarks — “you don’t want to be passing straight to the opposition!” or “you didn’t want to be letting the ball fly over your head, goalie!” — manages to be painfully infuriating and yet such a familiar part of the experience that we cannot bear to move away. please log in to view this image Having finished 16th last season, QPR have gone backwards this season and are 19th in the Championship with two games remaining It makes little sense — but that’s football for you. And that’s certainly QPR. This is the club where, in August 2011, Tony Fernandes led a takeover of a team heading into the top-flight. A cool £258 million of losses later, and counting, they are somehow much worse than when they started. It is an extraordinary achievement. Occasionally I like to imagine piling £258,000,000 of notes in a big heap and setting fire to it just to try to grasp how it must feel. All that incontinent spending without even getting round to building the new training ground that was being discussed when they took over. Or the new stadium. Or the upwardly mobile team. As for next season, well with parachute payments about to end (instantly reducing revenue by around £13 million) and more necessary cuts in the wage bill and losing the loan players who saved the team from relegation — just about — the future is not exactly encouraging, especially as fans fear that any half-decent bid will prove irresistible for assets like Massimo Luongo and Luke Freeman. Did I mention there is no manager? Steve McClaren was sacked as season ticket renewals began — coincidence? — and the club are trying to get someone on the cheap who can work with young players. Mark Warburton, formerly at Brentford and Rangers, would appear to make sense of those in the frame but it is a big decision. The reality is that the wrong appointment now by Les Ferdinand, the director of football who has been overseeing this decline (or reflection and rebuilding, as the club prefer to call it), and Sky Bet League One could beckon. please log in to view this image Football fans have almost blind loyalty but it could be tested were they ever to appoint Sherwood All this and yet of course we will be back. We will be signing up again. It’s what we do, so many hundreds of thousands of us throughout the divisions drawn back season after season even as we wonder how and why. Hornby was right that this loyalty is not really a badge of honour, much as fans love to make that claim. It is grown-up choice. There must be pleasure in the pain. There are those tantalising glimpses of joy and hope — a Freeman run, an Eze turn — that suck you in and, as those Oxford researchers discovered, even the anguished days provide memories and high emotion and the sense of being part of something. It is evolutionary. Or, as Hornby wrote: “What else can we do when we’re so weak?” Just so long as Tim Sherwood is not appointed manager under any circumstances. Astonishingly (or perhaps not), QPR were thinking about it. There are some things that would test any fan to the limit.
That's us in a nutshell, sad isn't it? But despite all the dross we'll be back for more eternally optimistic, or should that be masochistic?...
