45 pages • 1-hour read
Fever Pitch
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Themes
The Obsessive Nature of Fandom
Fandom might best be described as belonging to a community or subculture of people who share a common passion. In the case of author Nick Hornby, his fandom revolves around London-based Arsenal Football Club of the English Football League (now Premier League), which exists in the larger culture of English football. Hornby’s love and passion is the sport of football itself, but his obsession is Arsenal. In other words, he loves watching football and attending matches in general, but when Arsenal is involved, it becomes an obsessive experience because of his fandom. This is precisely the paradox that Hornby describes in writing, “what I have always wanted is to find a place where I could lose myself in the patterns and rhythms of football without caring about the score” (137). He goes on to compare that feeling of enjoying non-league football to the sourness that comes from supporting a big team.
The notion that football, despite how much he loves the game, is not a pleasurable experience for him is one that Hornby repeats countless times, and one that comes entirely from his Arsenal fandom. The emotional investment that Hornby has in Arsenal simply cannot allow him to enjoy it. Even when the club performs well, the pre-game nervousness, the intense fear of losing, and the immediate concern about the next opponent make even the victories sour.
The obsessive nature of Hornby’s fandom begins almost immediately when he decides that Arsenal will be his team, and it begins creating problems for him almost immediately. When he is 13 years old, Hornby catches a glimpse of himself on the televised highlights of a match that he attended at Southampton while visiting his grandparents. He is struck by the fact that everyone around him in the news clip seems to be having a good time, but he stands among them sober and motionless. Hornby later comments about this experience that “obsessions just aren’t funny, and obsessives don’t laugh” (35).
The obsessive concern about Arsenal lasts throughout Hornby’s teenaged years and well into adulthood. It clearly has an effect on his mental well-being, as evidenced by the fact that when he begins seeing a psychiatrist at age 29 in 1986, one of the steps that lifts him out of his years-long depression is to realize that his identity is separate from the club’s and the club’s success or failure has no relationship with his own. Perhaps more troubling, however, is that the obsessive nature of his fandom has such a profound effect on everyone around him as well. The negative effects on others are not only in the form of having to deal with sulking or foul moods when Arsenal performed poorly, but also in having to arrange events around Arsenal’s schedule. In his essay “Tyranny,” Hornby points out that “family and friends know, after long years of wearying experience, that the fixture list always has the last word in any arrangement” (205). He suggests that they understand, or at least accept, this burden, but being absent for weddings, birthdays, or other special events seems to cross a line of obsessive behavior.
The Dark Side of Football Culture
Many of the negative aspects that surround football culture are unique to England alone, but others are not. Chief among the ugliest aspects of football culture throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the timeline covered in Hornby’s memoir, is hooliganism. Football hooliganism, in the simplest terms, is violence and threatening behavior similar to that of street gangs perpetrated by fans. During this time, hooliganism certainly existed in other countries as well, but it was notoriously present within the highest levels of English football. By the mid-1980s, what was widely considered to be the peak of hooliganism in the United Kingdom, it had come to be known as “the English disease.”
Hornby refers to hooliganism by this name in his essay discussing the Heysel disaster that occurred in 1985, when 38 mostly Italian Juventus F.C. fans died after a wall collapsed during the European Cup Final match at Heysel Stadium in Brussels. The wall collapsed because Juventus fans crowded against it while fleeing Liverpool F.C. fans charging at them. Hornby explains that running at the opposing fans was “a practice that half the juvenile fans in the country had indulged in, and which was intended to do nothing more than frighten the opposition and amuse the runners” (147). However, those ordinary Juventus fans from Italy had no intricate knowledge of English crowd behavior, and this dark side of football culture common in England seemed like a threat that they should quickly retreat from, leading to the disaster.
Hooliganism was not the lone aspect of ugly football culture in England during the 1970s and 1980s; there was also rampant racism and anti-Semitism, and fans promoting a unique brand of nationalism always followed the England National Team to its matches at Wembley Stadium. Hornby provides an example of the racism that he saw firsthand during a 1987 match versus Liverpool in the debut game for John Barnes. Barnes, a Jamaican-born Black player for Liverpool, was taunted by his own fans, who hurled bananas onto the pitch. Hornby argues that Arsenal, by and large, does not have this sort of problem with anti-Black racism anymore, but he admits that their fan base still has an anti-Semitic element and songs about Hitler gassing Jews can still be heard. Hornby refers to incidents like this as “a matter of routine inside some football grounds” (182), and likely the same could have been said for the hooliganism that created such a dark side within football culture.
Football Fandom and Identity
The aspect of having an identity tied so strongly to football exists on multiple levels: There is one’s identity as a lover of the sport, one’s identity as a supporter of a certain club, and, because football in England has such a cultural meaning, one’s identity as part of the general community that watches first-division matches from the terraces. Almost immediately after attending his first match, Hornby becomes hooked on football, and just as quickly he is hooked on Arsenal. Becoming such a strong supporter of Arsenal at such a young age provides him with perhaps his first true identity and one that remains with him throughout his entire life. At the age of 11, all of his friends at school are football fans as well, but he is the lone Arsenal fan. That isolation, rather than pushing him away, almost certainly strengthens and shapes his identity as an Arsenal supporter.
When Hornby becomes an adult, the identity issues of being an Arsenal fan develop into a problem for him because he cannot separate himself from the collective Arsenal identity and therefore seems to lose his own individual identity. He cannot move past the notion that the success or failure of Arsenal somehow affects his own successes and failures. Hornby eventually seeks out professional help and overcomes the problem by learning how to control his obsession and part company from the club when needed. The moment of clarity that seemed to cure him comes, ironically, during a 1987 match after several months of therapy, when he begins to “understand [Arsenal] to have an entirely separate identity whose successes and failures has no relationship with my own” (174). The issue of football fandom and identity is undoubtedly what caused Hornby’s problems to begin with, and it seems to be a by-product of the obsessive nature of fandom itself. The sort of fandom that Hornby immerses himself in gives rise to a herd mentality that trades individual identity for group identity.
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