Why football matters - in celebration and in grief...

What exactly is an appropriate amount of time to be in mourning. A week? A month?

Above: Coventry City and Luton each had 36,000 fans at Wembley

After all, nobody’s died.

It’s merely hopes and dreams that have expired, shrouded in might-have-beens and wreathed in what-ifs

I’m talking about football, now that the English domestic season is over.

I was there at Wembley for the Championship play-off final when my team, Coventry City, failed by one wayward penalty kick against Luton to return to the Premier League, after 22 years of absence in lower leagues.

I have friends who mourn the fact that Arsenal didn’t quite have the staying power to win the Premier League, even though it was a brilliant season. And I have friends who support Manchester Utd, who’re even more glum about losing the FA Cup final to their home-town rivals, Manchester City.

Since the season’s end, I’ve been reflecting why these things matter so much to football fans.

On one level, it’s inconsequential. The difference between winning and losing doesn’t materially change people’s lives. At least, not in the same way as serious illness in your family, a big increase in the cost of your mortgage, or suddenly losing a job.

But in reality, it matters enormously because we football fans make it so. We want it to matter. We crave the thrills and the suspense. We love the beauty of the game when played at its intoxicating best.

Whether it’s through a tribalism based on towns and cities, the camaraderie of shared experience with family and friends, our competitive thirst quenched vicariously through the players on the pitch, or a release from the stresses and strains of daily life, it matters alright!

You may not know most of the other 20,000 fans in your stadium, but the shared experience creates a coherent community of dedication, resilience, joy and irreverent humour, with which the players can connect.

And these days, all of that spills over into social media in a 48-hour festival of opinions, observations and declarations of unbridled love or outrage before and after games.

Fans play a part in the drama, unlike the audience in the theatre or the cinema. Managers often describe the supporters as "the 12th man", helping to drive the team forward.

The writer Arthur Hopcroft, who wrote the TV adaption of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, was also a football reporter, who wrote romantically about our “beautiful game”. In his famous book “The Football Man”, he derided those who thought football was “only a game”.

He claimed that football ceased to be just a game from the moment in the late nineteenth century that “the working classes saw it as an escape route from drudgery”.

Football has changed since Hopcroft wrote that in 1968. It’s far too simplistic now to say it’s only a working class sport. After all, the money men have spent decades marketing football to the middle classes. Remember Roy Keane bemoaning some Manchester Utd fans in 2000 for eating prawn sandwiches while not knowing what was happening on the pitch?

But what Keane also said in that interview was that the away supporters — what he called the hardcore fans — were fantastic. And it’s true that the frenzied exhilaration from witnessing a winning goal away from home can be especially intense. Not a prawn sandwich in sight.

Above: Manchester Utd fans were left disappointed after defeat in the FA Cup Final by Manchester City

When Coventry City got relegated from the Premier League at Aston Villa in 2001, my son of university age sobbed on my shoulder. When we lost on penalties at Wembley in the play-off final, it was my seven year old grandson who burst into tears.

Three generations in mourning. But, hey, it was a really thrilling ride, and we enjoyed it together. There’s always next season.

A couple of hours after our Wembley defeat to Luton Town I texted my friend Anwar, who is a Luton supporter. It’s where he lives. It’s his community. It's his team.

I begrudgingly, but magnanimously (I thought), congratulated him on being promoted to the Premier League and asked if he was at the game.

The reply was a photo of himself and his family inside the ground, beaming with pleasure and surrounded by celebrating Luton fans. The scene was irritatingly orange, and unfortunately not sky blue.

You see, there’s an equilibrium in football fandom. For every person’s pain, there’s an inverse image of someone else’s pleasure.