Giving ourselves over to passionate support of a particular team in any sport usually means checking logic at the door, losing the ticket, and drinking so much shit beer we forget we brought our precious logic with us in the first place. High, lows, the desperate irrelevancy of mediocrity; they all bring with them opportunities to look hard at our squads, our managers, and the team's prospects, and do what supporters (and professional analysts for that matter) have done since the beginning of organized sports clubs one hundred and fifty years ago. Get it completely, utterly, totally wrong, and feel no guilt about doing so.


Guilt cannot grow where obliviousness poisons the soil.


And yet, no matter the reasons for it or how justifiable it is from a very human standpoint, this lack of logic, perhaps better termed in the positive as "bias", is anathema. We're not supposed to be oblivious, we're supposed to realize our bias and correct it, as if it is a soul-staining sin dooming us to the pits of a fiery hell of community disdain. How dare we overrate our team, or fail to acknowledge that our league or club pales in comparison to others. Homer-ism will not be tolerated. Take your blinding passion and shove it.


Never mind that without blind passion, there wouldn't be a beautiful game to argue over. The history of the sport is built on people paying hard earned money to cram into spartan stadiums and watch grown men play a game. Through the circumstance of history, and the late blooming nature of soccer here, America is the land of the soccer aficionado; suppressing your bias-laden opinion and getting with the "proper" viewpoint is part of the price paid to enter the selective club of worldly appreciators. Soccer isn't just another sport, played by brutish louts like American football or freakish giants like basketball; it's a way of life, a secret gift passed like a precious heirloom, the Faberge egg of athletic endeavors, a priceless treasure to be treated with all of the reverence due the world's greatest game.


Bias, for lack of a subtler phrase, is a bitch to overcome. Human beings are full of biases, both natural and assumed, that will affect how they see the world and how they relate their views to others. Soccer is a particularly fertile area for the application of bias in the sporting world; not only is the game played on every continent with the expected local attention, it also crosses borders in ways no other single cultural touchstone does. Local competitions no longer exist in single-nation cocoons, but as part of a worldwide fabric of the game that makes comparing everything from leagues to players to branding the pastime of every honk with a television, an internet connection, and the annoying need to proffer his or her opinion without ever being asked.


But for every supposedly objective observer cranking out thousands of words a week on the relative quality of this player and that team, there are thousands for whom a love of the game means reacting and overreacting to everything with their hearts first and only. This isn't something to be lamented, but rather a integral part of the makeup of soccer; without the unrepentant homers, who might one week back a player or manager than turn virulently against them the next, there is no reason to care. Without the self-styled analysts playing foil to their own foggy-minded nonsense, the fans would have no one to rail against, no one to strengthen their resolve and heighten their passion. Both play parts in the greater drama, giving depth to the performance of the other exactly because they are so diametrically opposed in philosophy.


You suck, because you clearly hate my team.


No, you suck because your fandom blinds you to the truth.


Call it reciprocal cannibalism, a strange phenomenon where each feeds off the other, and would be left to an agonizing death by starvation of conflict if the other didn't exist.


It's a lovely arrangement, bloody carcasses notwithstanding.


So...spat this out, not sure where it was headed when it began. Apologies for any proofreading errors, but it's late and I couldn't possibly stand to take yet another look in the morning.