"I know how I can care about football!" said my housemate Oliver, the other day. "If I put money on one of the teams, I'd want them to win!" Naturally, I covered my eyes and tried to explain, again.
The team isn't the players or the manager. If it were, then when Harry Redknapp went from managing Portsmouth to Tottenham Hotspur and then hired all of his favourite players away from Pompey, then I'd have changed my allegiance at that point. But it doesn't work that way.
The team isn't the stadium, either. My beloved team's Fratton Park is a shoebox covered in seagull shit which only got twentieth-century toilet facilities three years ago. Getting there is a pain in the arse and involves using a railway station that simply isn't up to the job, and that's assuming that the trains are running to get you there in the first place.
If the team were the management structure, if it were the board of directors, then you wouldn't hear - in the worst of times - crowds singing "Sack the board" and "You're not fit to run the team". "Stick your fucking Arabs up your arse" isn't as racist as it sounds, when your club's dramatic financial collapse can be directly dated to when a selection of businessmen from Dubai decided they were going to consider thinking of investing in it. If it were, then those same fans wouldn't, immediately afterwards, have started singing about being "Pompey 'till I die".
The team, the club, is a complicated combination of all those factors and more. It's about getting sympathetic, if patronising, applause from a bunch of Manchester United fans in a pub in Levenshulme when your team scores a consolation goal against Arsenal. It's about joining in with a song on the London Underground - when you're in the Smoke for a non-football related reason - on a weekend when your team's had an unexpected victory.
If you think about your team in this way, if you call them "us" without irony or post-modernism, then betting _against_ your team, even when you're pretty sure you know they're going to lose, is literally inconceivable. It would be like betting against your mum. And that's why I still love Portsmouth FC; despite hating the city itself with a passion, despite watching the morning news with dread in case they've gone into administration, despite being absolutely certain that we're going to be relegated to the second tier in the summer. Because I couldn't do anything else, really.
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