What if my child does not want to support my football team?
When I was young and single I always assumed that, when I had a son or daughter, they would follow in my footsteps. Sure, they might not spend years working in a call centre or grow a highly dubious chin-fluff goatee in their early twenties, but I thought they would copy some things I do. Like which football team I support. After all, supporting Raith Rovers would follow family tradition. My dad was a Rovers fan and so was his dad. So was his dad, probably, although I have no idea. Let’s say he was, for narrative purposes.
I could have supported Queen of the South (the closest team to our home) or Albion Rovers (the team my mum grew up following), but I didn’t. If the Harrow men supported Raith Rovers, that was enough for me too.
And it has been. For 20-odd years until he passed away a couple of years ago, my dad and I shared lots of highs, lows and deeply unsatisfying draws together. They are some of my happiest memories with him, outwith the time he let me join his five-a-side game when I was still at school and I booted the ball straight into my science teacher’s bollocks.
I’m now about to be a dad myself, to a little girl. It is very exciting but also a little frightening. I want to share those same experiences – even the science teacher one – with my daughter but I’m worried that I won’t. I’m scared that the thing I always assumed would happen – my offspring becoming a Raith Rovers fan – might not come to pass.
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There are a few alternative scenarios, some better than others. The first, and best, is that my daughter gravitates towards another “wee” team. Growing up in Glasgow, she might choose Partick Thistle or Queen’s Park. I’d even accept Dumbarton (but would draw the line at Clyde). Any of those lower league clubs (apart from Clyde) would be OK. We could still bond over misery. She might be tempted by Glasgow City or another women’s team and I’d look forward to taking her to SWPL games. None of these options are as good as supporting Raith, but they’re OK. Fine, even.
A worse possibility: she might not be interested in football at all. She might regard my interest in Raith Rovers the way my wife treats my interest in science fiction –something so uncool she wants nothing to do with it. Any mention will be greeted with a cock of the head and a roll of the eyes that say: “I appreciate you enjoy this but please keep it as far away from my personal space as possible.”
Stark’s Park in all its glory. Photograph: Ted Blackbrow/Shutterstock
I would prefer her having no interest in football to the other option: she might become a Celtic fan. It’s my fault, of course. I would like to blame someone else, but no one else met my now-wife on Tinder, charmed her and married her in a whirlwind of Rage Against the Machine, orange-flavoured tequila and vomit (mine, not hers). Through all of this, I knew she was a Celtic fan. To her credit, she was quite upfront about it from the start.
What’s more, I knew her family were also Celtic fans. I knew her parents had season tickets. I have been to an Old Firm game with her mum. I went to Champions League qualifiers where I was forced to “do the huddle” because not doing it would have instantly outed me as an interloper.
I’m not going to lie – the fan experience of going to Parkhead is significantly better than rattling around Stark’s Park. After all, it’s massive. And it’s usually pretty busy, even if it’s not full. We can all laugh about the millions they have spent on disco lights, but just imagine how impressive that sight would would look to a 10-year old. That’s who those lights are for, after all: the idiots and the pre-teens.
Compare that to your average Saturday at Raith Rovers. It’s fine when you’re there with friends and family. You’ve all bought into lower league football already and you’ve built up a natural tolerance to the fundamental bleakness of it. If anything, you embrace it. The three-quarter empty stadiums; the sound systems that blast out 10% pop music and 90% hard static; and the sequences of play where the ball bounces around so erratically that it can only be controlled by some invisible force chasing it with a leaf blower. We’ll take everything lower league football can throw at us and then spend £25 again the following week.
But it’s really hard to convince someone about it after they have been captured by disco lights, competent passing and all those goals Celtic will rack up. Come on down to Stark’s Park, child, where we can offer you eight seats to yourself and the empty feeling that comes with a 0-0 home draw with Brechin City.
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If she does follow Celtic, her experience of football will be so different to mine. She’ll never experience the absurd, out-of-body joy of celebrating a last-minute equaliser at Alloa, or following a game at Central Park behind metal railings and massive monster truck tyres. She’ll never know what it feels like to support a team who lose more games than they win (terrible). She’ll never become programme editor or Tannoy announcer because no one else is available to do it. She’ll never be the only Raith fan in her school, uni, work and she’ll never know how pleasant it is to be defined by this and not, say, your big nose. And then there’s all the other stuff that comes with being a Celtic fan in Glasgow too. Which is, from this outsider’s viewpoint, absolutely rubbish.
What could possibly tempt a young football fan to Celtic Park? Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA
These are the options, then. At some point in the distant future, I’m going to have to confront this. It feels like a big deal but there’s a nagging part of me that also knows it isn’t. I’m worrying about nothing. Deep in the sensible, non-football part of my mind, I know that once she’s here and she’s no longer a set of size comparisons on a phone app – “your child will now be the length of a semi-ripe mango from Sainsbury’s” – who she chooses to support will not really matter. When she is old enough to decide what she likes, all I’m going to care about is that she’s happy.
If she’s having a nice time between 3pm and 5pm on a Saturday – whether it’s at Stark’s Park, Parkhead or the nearest hair salon (what do 10-year-old girls do? I have no idea) so long as we’re spending time together is all that really matters.
This article appeared first in Nutmeg magazine
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