The leagues are many, I really can’t keep count. The clubs are equally many, local and international, but I get to hear about some, the ones nearer my zone – i.e., the club my son supports, Chelsea or Manchester United, because many comedians and songwriters keep putting them up. Then there is the merchandising, T-shirts, mugs, mufflers, you name it. Supporters’ clubs are completely different animals worldwide. Emotions run so high that people are willing to come to blows on account of an untoward comment in reference to their clubs. Once when I took a train in London, I was marooned by a drunken group of football fans who would not let anyone out of the train because they had pretty much occupied the exit doors of the train. We were inconvenienced because their team had won. Foul-mouthed, drunk and near violent, we all looked another way when they were carrying on for fear that they might unleash their brand of football hooliganism on us. We could only depart the train when they had all trooped out leaving in their trail beer cans, forgotten mufflers, autographed memorabilia and their foul breath. Clearly it was our fault that they had won and we paid for it dearly by coming off the train four stops away from our designated disembarkment.
I have tried to understand football fever, watched as grown men are reduced to stuttering, gibbering children when their teams are on the verge of scoring a goal. I have seen my son, an avowed fanatic, yell instructions to teams and players who cannot hear him. I have watched in horror a sick man bring himself to near death by jumping up and down on his bed as a match becomes more exciting. I have heard severally of men who have died watching football because even after several warnings from their doctors, they still insisted that they could not do without football excitement. I have seen men grown and destroyed by the beautiful game; I have seen monies made, stars made beyond our imagination, sandals and stories that are a novelist’s dream. Sepp Blatter, Diego Maradona, Kanu Nwankwo, Pele, Jay Jay Okocha, Michel Obi, Didier Drogba and the likes. The list is endless. What game is this that makes the women who have joined men in being fanatical about this game, simply put, more fanatical? Women in football not just the playing but in the screaming, in the kicking, in the insane fanaticism! I have been a fan once and I never tire of repeating this story.
My near insane fanaticism was during what is now known as the miracle of Daman where Nigeria had practically lost and returned to win the game by returning 4 previously unreplied goals and then going on to win against the former USSR. We became champions lifting the FIFA Junior World Cup in 1989.
I screamed so hard, my ribs hurt. And I was pregnant. In the end I gave birth to a football mad son. You guessed, the Chelsea fan. Now, he watches all the matches, plays this game himself for leisure and has inducted my twins into the game. They are both girls.
Someone should explain to me in real scientific terms how a round leather ball with several men chasing it around a field has affected us so deeply worldwide that we have all lost our minds. I have friends who save to go and watch live matches abroad. The final question is: how did football administrators over the years succeed in emotionally hijacking over half the population of the world? In-between the fraud, the match fixing, the corruption and all that, football still keeps the world glued to the screens and screaming at stadiums. The advertising in football is one of the highest-yielding in revenues and there are winners and millionaires everywhere as there are losers and hooligans.
I still watch football from time to time when Nigeria is playing an intercontinental match and I wear the Nigerian green-white-green mufflers. In the presence of ardent fans, the various sounds they make sometimes resemble an asphyxiation, a grunt, a strangulated laughter, a continuous scream and everything in-between. While we are all screaming, poor, rich, old, strong, weak, some persons described vaguely as footballers, their managers and club owners are laughing all the way to the bank.
As we say in Nigeria when something seems a bit cloudy, confusing or not so clear, “It is well”!
Eugenia Abu
