Fans n stuff [old post]

Fans n stuff [old post]
Note: did this for a school newsletter. It's very ignorant of many factors, and it's supposed to be just to take the mickey a little bit!


I’ve never quite understood football. Don’t get me wrong, it has its fans who enjoy watching the sport very much, but I personally don’t get what’s so great about some people kicking a ball around a pitch for an hour and a half whilst simultaneously attempting to receive the Oscar award for best acting when they fall down and ‘break their leg’. It’s nothing they can’t get over of course, just until a member of the opposing team is sent off, and then magically the leg reheals, and he’s off sprinting down the field with the ball once more.
I suppose with absolutely anything out there, you get people that hate it, and the ones that are die-hard fans of it. It’s  those die-hard fans that provide the most entertainment and cringe-worthy moments following events such as football matches, for example those people that, despite their team losing, argue that their team was the best of all time and would have won if the game was ‘fair’ and the referee wasn’t taking bribes or something ridiculous like that.  I wish this were an exaggeration, but I’ve heard it far too many times for it to be unrealistic and every single time I hear something like that, I don’t know whether to laugh or just despair. If team X beat team Y, then they were clearly better in that occasion. Get over it.

It’s not just football either that causes scenarios like that. I do a lot of writing for a newsletter on a gaming website, my own blog which can be very gaming-influenced at times and also a Youtube channel which is pretty much videogaming-only. If you so much as attempt to compare the ‘Xbox 360’ to the ‘Playstation 3’ then you might as well go and build a concrete bunker and wait for the fallout to clear. World War 3 will not be initiated by conflicts in trade routes, or countries gaining power, or oil disputes like people have predicted it could, it will be started by an argument about which videogame console is better. Despite being a big videogamer myself, I could not care less which is the ‘better’ console, but people on the internet try to convince me that I should care, and that it is a ‘super serious issue’.

I kid you not, I once got a message on Youtube from some guy who threatened to hack my Playstation 3, and then into my bank account (which I don’t have) and home internet if I didn’t buy an Xbox 360 immediately. I asked if he worked for Microsoft, as some sort of freelance salesman or something and he said he didn’t, he just felt like burdening himself with bringing failure to the Playstation brand because he didn’t like the PS3.  No words can describe the immense stupidity of that ideology.

It doesn’t even have to be limited to gaming either; I’ve regularly heard people complain about opposing sporting teams all the time for the stupidest reasons. One time I overheard a conversation somewhere, which went something like “I can’t stand Wednesday. They’re terrible” “Why do you hate them so much” “Because they’ve got owls on their shirts and I don’t like owls”. I waited for one of them to laugh, but this man was indeed serious about his dislike of a football team simply because of the animal that represented them on a shirt. Whilst there are many valid reasons for disliking a football team, I’m not entirely sure a simple hatred of owls and therefore Sheffield Wednesday is that valid, if I’m perfectly honest.
There are some legitimate reasons for loving/loathing a football team, with the most common one being ‘because they’re good/bad’ which is fair enough, but I can’t help but think that people just  choose random teams and then try to argue that they’re the best. ‘The best’ is subjective, unless you’re going on points or something.  A team could also be the best by being the most entertaining  team, like by having a sense of humour in the interviews or something after the match instead of  saying things like “Well there were only two teams and there could only be one winner” which is something that we all knew anyway before we’d even seen the match.
In fact, I’m sure that cavemen would also have been able to figure that out.

So, after going quite horribly off the point a bit, I’ll try and get back to the original topic. It’s fine to be a fan of something, but it’s never a good idea to believe a one-sided argument. X is not better than Y simply because ‘X is better’, likewise if Y is the inferior in all respects, it doesn’t mean it can’t have fans.
I just wish people would start to understand these sort of things before giving me grief over the fact that I use Google Chrome as a web browser instead of Mozilla Firefox because at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter, does it?
And everyone knows Google Chrome is far superior anyway.