A fandom of disparate similarity...

In the perennial battle of choosing the better player between Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, I, for one, like to take a neutral stance. It’s not because I don’t enjoy their distinctive style of play, but because I don’t care enough to prefer and elect one over the other. 

It’s a choice that also extends to every other footballer, even those outside the league of these two guys. For, somehow, I have never understood the fandom for footballers, despite being a fan of several other sportsmen and women. 
 

Not that I don’t love football. I do. It’s the one thing that keeps my weekends going, ninety minutes of thrall, followed by a week of mundane chores unless there’s the mid-week excitement of the Champions League, before waiting for the weekend games to begin. However, despite being a fan of the sport, my attraction has never crossed over to the players. 

I have had my share of jerseys, and I have had my share of crushes on footballers in my early days of fan following. But now, it’s more about the sport than the sportsmen doing the job of representing it. 
 

While there’s a certain amount of eccentricity to this, I also like to think that this aspect of me being this different a football fan is largely due to the aura – read ego – that surrounds the players. And the various offshoots that manifest out of their auras.

I have long felt the footballers in themselves are somewhere disparate to the continuance of football. Larger than lives they obviously are, but with each success they have – either at the club level, or at the international level, or at both – their largeness swells correspondingly higher. 

It’s a trait that’s funny and maddening at the same time. Funny, because it’s predictable as if footballers were going through a rite of passage, unchanged throughout the course of the sport. It’s maddening because this wonky, egocentric rite of passage has the players come up with variations in their bid to prove themselves as the ‘next-best-thing-to-sliced-bread’, or its appropriate football equivalency. 

This resultantly emerging tug-of-war has then made me a dissimilar football fan to have around. The subtler irony hasn’t though gone misplaced. 

Just as it doesn’t matter to the vast swathes of majority whether one isolated fan doesn’t believe in any players in particular, fans of one player are going to be clamouring for – and raving about – his superiority. Everyone else, to these fans, is redundant. Or, worse still, an example to be made of; in the greatest of stages, whichever tournament it may be. 

Why then to waste one’s breath, when haters are going to continue to hate? 

Though, it will perhaps be an unsolvable mystery for me. And I couldn’t care less. Just as I don’t care who the better player between Ronaldo and Messi is, and as I don’t care about the outcome of El Clasico one way or other, except for wanting a thoroughly most entertaining partido.