Fever Pitch

“The audiences I had hitherto been a part of had paid to have a good time and, though occasionally one might spot a fidgety child or a yawning adult, I hadn’t ever noticed faces contorted by rage or despair or frustration. Entertainment as pain was an idea entirely new to me, and it seemed to be something I’d been waiting for.”

One of the primary things that stands out to Hornby during his first trip to Highbury to see Arsenal play is that the mostly male crowd members are obviously not enjoying themselves because of the club’s performance. The concept of paying for entertainment and then being upset by it is new to Hornby, but it is one he will come to understand when he becomes fanatical about the club. This concept reinforces the book’s primary theme—the obsessive nature of fandom

in that those who become fanatical about something have a hard time accepting when their expectations are not met.

“I hadn’t ever come across opposing fans before, and I loathed them in a way I had never before loathed strangers.” 

After Hornby attends his first several Arsenal games at Highbury, his father gets tickets for the League Cup Final to be held at Wembley Stadium. The match versus Swindon Town, a lower-division club and large underdog, is unique because it is Hornby’s first time being in stands among supporters of the opposing team. When Arsenal loses the match in extra time and his father stands to applaud Swindon Town’s effort, Hornby reacts poorly and then gets a lecture about sportsmanship from his father.

“I was chained to Arsenal and my dad was chained to me, and there was no way out for any of us.” 

Although Hornby’s father begins taking him to Arsenal matches, his father is not particularly a fan of the club. Because Arsenal is considered a boring club to watch and because many of their matches are low scoring, it becomes a point of discomfort for Hornby knowing that his father would likely rather be watching a different club. The obsessive nature of his fandom, however, even in his first few seasons, demands his loyalty and presence, and because his father introduced him to football as a way for them to bond after he moved out of the house, they are both chained to regular matches at Highbury.

“What I needed more than anything was a place where unfocused unhappiness could thrive, where I could be still and worry and mope; I had the blues, and when I watched my team I could unwrap them and let them breathe a little.” 

Only a few days before he turns 14, Hornby catches a glimpse of himself on television during the news highlights of one of the matches. He is struck by how he appears to be watching the match so seriously and so differently than everyone around him. His explanation reinforces the book’s overarching theme: His fandom is obsessive and does not allow him to have fun at Arsenal matches. Despite the fact that he is a typical child in every other aspect of his life, he simply has no desire to have fun at Arsenal matches.

“Ever since I have been old enough to understand what it means to be suburban I have wanted to come from somewhere else, preferably North London.” 

In his essay titled “Islington Boy,” referring to the borough of London where Arsenal plays, Hornby describes his experience of attending an away Arsenal match versus Reading F.C., a lower-division club. Reading’s stadium, the club located closest to his home, is only a few miles away, as opposed to Arsenal’s Highbury Stadium, which is roughly 30 miles away. While at the match, he becomes friendly with a family of Reading supporters, and the father chides him for supporting Arsenal rather than his local team. It is a humiliating experience because his identity has become so intertwined with all things Arsenal and Highbury that he now seems fraudulent. This quote reinforces a secondary theme of the book dealing with football fandom and identity.

“But those who mumble about the loss of identity football fans must endure miss the point: this loss of identity can be a paradoxically enriching process.” 

In his essay titled “My Mum and Charlie George,” Hornby discusses two of the book’s secondary themes: football fandom and identity and the dark side of football culture in the form of hooliganism. The quote is in reference to his experience of attending an away match versus Derby County F.C. in 1972. On his way from the train station to the stadium, Hornby mixes in with hundreds of other Arsenal supporters and therefore feels protected from the hooligans of the opposing club and allows the fantasy of his imagined 14-year-old toughness to run wild. His loss of identity is that he is, at least on this particular occasion, mistaken for a typical, intimidating football hooligan on his walk to the stadium.

“I had been to the vast majority of the home games and a few of the aways; I had as much right as any, and probably more right than most, to a spot on the terraces at Wembley, and so my pride came from the feeling of belonging I had lacked in the previous year.” 

At the close of the 1971-72 season, Arsenal once again advanced to the Football Association Cup Final, held each year at Wembley Stadium in London. Hornby did not attend the previous year when Arsenal had also advanced to the Final, so he is proud to be counted among the Arsenal fans on this day. At the time, the FA allocates tickets through the clubs using a system that rewards the most loyal fans by placing vouchers on the backs of match-day programs. Because he knows that he had been among the club’s most loyal fans, Hornby feels a sense of belonging.

“For the first, but certainly not the last, time, I began to believe that Arsenal’s moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own.” 

Over the summer of 1972, Hornby’s life changes in a major way, and Arsenal has changed significantly as well following its FA Cup Final loss the previous season. Arsenal began the season using the unique Dutch “total football” approach, which de-emphasizes positional play on the pitch, but the changes to Hornby’s life are more dramatic. He learns for the first time that his father, who is now living in France, has a new family, and he has two younger half-siblings. Hornby considers the fact that Arsenal has adopted this flamboyant style of play and the fact that his life now seems exotic to be analogous. The belief that how Arsenal is performing is linked closely to how his life is going will be one that Hornby holds for many years.

“The big clubs seem to have tired of their fan base, and in a way who can blame them? Young working-class and lower-middle-class males bring with them a complicated and occasionally distressing set of problems; directors and chairmen might argue that they had their chance and blew it, and that middle-class families—the new target audience—will not only behave themselves, but pay much more to do so.” 

In his essay “Graduation Day,” Hornby discusses a major change that occurred for him inside Highbury, when at 15 years old he stopped watching the matches from the standing-only area known as the Schoolboy’s enclosure and instead relocated to the standing-only North Bank section, where the club’s most vocal and rowdiest fans gathered. The quote refers to the fact that at the time of his writing, the stadium had become an all-seater, doing away with standing-only sections as a measure to combat hooliganism. This passage reflects on one of the book’s themes concerning the dark side of football culture, but it also brings up questions dealing with a club’s role in the community and whether the traditional football experience and atmosphere have changed too much.

“But there are football fans, thousands of them, who have neither the need nor the desire to get a perspective on their own aggression. I worry for them and I despise them and I’m frightened of them; and some of them, grown men in their mid-thirties with kids, are too old now to go around threatening to kick heads, but they do anyway.” 

In his essay titled “The Whole Package,” Hornby discusses the issue of masculinity and how football fans are perceived by others. He describes a match in April of 1972, one of the first he attended after he had relocated to the North Bank section of the stadium and began watching among the rowdiest Arsenal fans. At a tense moment in the match, after an opponent’s goal, a small incident of hooliganism breaks out, with the opposing fans being threatened by some of the Arsenal crowd. Hornby, distraught over the goal, joins in on the threatening behavior but quickly becomes ashamed of it. Although he regretfully realizes that he is participating in the dark side of football culture that had given the sport such a bad name all over the world and is able to stop himself, he knows that others have no such ability to control themselves because that culture is so entrenched in them.

“My childhood was dying, cleanly and decently, and if you can’t mourn a loss of that resonance properly, then what can you mourn? At eighteen, I had at last grown up. Adulthood could not accommodate the kind of obsession I had been living with, and if I had to sacrifice Terry Mancini and Peter Simpson so that I could understand Camus properly and sleep with lots of nervy, neurotic and rapacious art students, then so be it. Life was about to begin, so Arsenal had to go.” 

At the close of Part 1 of the book, Hornby discusses his attempts to transition into adulthood and a conscious decision that he made at 18 years old to change his identity from football fan to intellectual. This quote explores the primary theme of the book, the obsessive nature of fandom, and a strong secondary theme, football fandom and identity. Despite his obsessive fandom, the decision seems to be an easy one at the time both because Arsenal has performed so poorly recently and because he has developed new interests and met new friends that he gravitates toward because they share those interests.

“If I had been correct in assuming previously that my indifference marked the onset of maturity, then that maturity had lasted just ten months, and by the age of nineteen I was already into my second childhood.”

At the beginning of Part 2, Hornby explores his primary theme by revealing that the conscious decision he made to leave football behind for intellectual pursuits and girls did not last even a full year. Following the 1975-76 Arsenal season, the club’s longtime manager, Bertie Mee, resigned, and the club hired former player Terry Neill to manage. Neill immediately made important changes and purchased key new players, which perks Hornby’s interest in the club again, and he is back at the stadium for the opening game. Apparently, as he explains it, Hornby’s attempt to move on from football has more to do with Arsenal’s ineptitude than it does with the new interests that he has developed.

“Football, famously, is the people’s game, and as such is prey to all sorts of people who aren’t, as it were, the people. Some like it because they are sentimental socialists; some because they went to public school, and regret doing so; some because their occupation—writer or broadcaster or advertising executive—has removed them far away from where they feel they belong, or where they have come from, and football seems to them a quick and painless way of getting back there.” 

Hornby discusses the secondary theme of football fandom and identity in his essay titled “A Fourth Division College Town.” When he begins university at Jesus College of Cambridge, he realizes that his experience of gaining a university degree is far different from most typical football fans whom he has encountered on the terraces, but he makes the argument that the perceptions that people have of football fans are exaggerated anyway. While it may be true that most fans do not have an Oxbridge degree, most fans are not violent thugs either. Hornby is pleasantly surprised to find out in college that he is not alone: There are other students there just like him, others who love football.

“I managed, in fact, to ensure that any of the privileges a Cambridge education can confer on its beneficiaries would bypass me completely. In truth, I was scared of the place, and football, my childhood comforter, my security blanket, was a way of coping with it all.” 

Although he likely thought that going to Cambridge would alter his identity as a football fan and his life would move away from the football fandom of his youth, it does not. Hornby’s life during his college years is still football-centric: He travels to Arsenal matches on the weekends, plays for the college’s team twice a week, and even begins attending matches for the local professional team, Cambridge United. Bypassing most of the traditional activities that an aspiring writer would be involved in as a Cambridge student is by design because football is his comfort zone.

“I go to football for loads of reasons, but I don’t go for entertainment, and when I look around me on a Saturday and see those panicky, glum faces, I see that others feel the same. For the committed fan, entertaining football exists in the same way as those trees that fall in the middle of the jungle: you presume it happens, but you’re not in a position to appreciate it.” 

With this quote, Hornby goes to the heart of his overarching theme concerning the obsessive nature of fandom. Attending Arsenal football matches, because he is such a committed fan, is not a fun or entertaining experience, regardless of the outcome. Even when the club performs well, he is immediately concerned about the next opponent or the overall standings in the league, and when the club performs poorly, it is almost unbearable for him.

“Looking back, it was quite clear that the stuff on the terraces was getting worse and that sooner or later something was going to happen that would change it all, somehow. In my experience there was more violence in the seventies—that is to say, there was fighting more or less every week—but in the first half of the eighties, with Millwall’s F-Troop, West Ham’s Inter-City Firm (and the calling cards that these factions were reputed to leave on the battered bodies of their victims), the England fans and their alleged National Front agenda—it was less predictable and much nastier.”

Referring directly to one of the book’s themes concerning the dark side of football culture, Hornby describes how entrenched hooliganism was within the game. What began as fist fights regularly breaking out during league matches in the 1960s and 1970s developed into full-blown gang fights during the 1980s. Virtually every club in the league had a gang of hooligans, known as firms, which even gave themselves names, and England’s National Football Team had a strong following within the fascist National Front political movement. As Hornby details, the situation with football hooliganism was building to the point that some major incident was bound to occur that would change the game.

“There is a sourness that is central to the experience of supporting a big team, and you can’t do anything about it apart from live with it and accept that professional sport has to be sour if it is to mean anything at all.” 

In his essay titled “The Munsters and Quentin Crisp,” Hornby describes his love for the sport, which ultimately fuels the obsessive nature of his Arsenal fandom. In admitting that he would watch football any place, any time, and in any weather, he remembers a non-league match that he attended for Saffron Walden Town’s club. For Hornby, it was a pleasure to attend non-league matches such as this, or those for Cambridge United while in college, because they allowed him to lose himself in the game that he loved without having to worry about winning or losing or league standings.

“In short, Heysel was an organic part of a culture that many of us, myself included, had contributed towards.” 

At the 1985 European Cup Final match between Liverpool, the English champion, and Juventus, the Italian champion, 38 fans died when a wall collapsed. The incident occurs because hooligans supporting Liverpool charged at the Juventus fans, making them crowd against the wall. The act of charging, or running, toward the opposing fans, even when it was often just meant to threaten, was a practice that had been going on with English football hooligans for several years. Hornby points out that he never engaged in hooligan behaviors such as this but admits that all English fans as obsessive as he was contributed to the tragedy because of the culture that had developed around the sport.

“The things that I have often tried to explain to people about football—that it is not an escape, or a form of entertainment, but a different version of the world—were clear for her to see; I felt vindicated, somehow.” 

In his essay titled “Freeing the Log-Jam,” Hornby describes attending a match in 1986 with his girlfriend at the time. Prior to attending the match, the girlfriend became annoyed because of his sulking and foul mood due to the fact that Arsenal played so poorly in the previous game. At this particular match, the club’s poor performance continues, so much so that Arsenal fans begin to revolt and cheer the opponents. Following the match, fans demonstrate outside the stadium to show their anger over the direction of the club, and the two witness this collective anger and view it as a community that cares about what is going on. Hornby feels vindicated when his girlfriend realizes that such a community that shares his passion exists.

“I now understand them to have an entirely separate identity whose success and failure has no relationship with my own. That night, I stopped being an Arsenal lunatic and relearnt how to be a fan, still cranky, and still dangerously obsessive, but only a fan nonetheless.”

After years of not being able to find a post-college career that he enjoys and after a string of unhealthy relationships, Hornby decides, in 1986, to begin seeing a psychiatrist to sort himself out. At the time, he feels cursed in some way, and his football obsession certainly does not help, but after months of therapy, he has a breakthrough and begins to realize that he is not cursed; he has just invested so much emotionally into Arsenal that he has become convinced that his own luck and success are somehow tied up with that of the club. Hornby credits not only the psychiatrist but also the Arsenal performance at a subsequent match with helping him to regain his own identity.

“Sport and life, especially the arty life, are not exactly analogous. One of the great things about sport is its cruel clarity: there is no such thing, for example, as a bad one-hundred-metre runner, or a hopeless center-half who got lucky; in sport, you get found out. Nor is there such a thing as an unknown genius striker starving in a garret somewhere, because the scouting system is foolproof. (Everyone gets watched.) There are, however, plenty of bad actors or musicians or writers making a decent living, people who happened to be in the right place at the right time, or knew the right people, or whose talents have been misunderstood or overestimated.” 

Hornby uses one essay to discuss Gus Caesar, an Arsenal defender throughout the latter half of the 1980s. Caesar is legendary in Arsenal folklore, not because of his great exploits, like many other players, but because of his poor play and miscues. Hornby explains how fans publicly humiliated Caesar by ironically cheering even simple plays that he pulled off successfully. Despite the fact that Caesar clearly possessed the talent, he never lived up to the expectations that come with that talent. Hornby compares Caesar’s playing career to his own writing career as he was starting out, when the rejection letters piled up.

“As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive.”

Directly reflecting on the obsessive nature of fandom, Hornby describes the tyranny that football holds over his life, and by extension the tyranny that his fandom holds over the lives of his friends and family. What he is referring to is that his life has to be arranged in such a way that it does not interfere with his football fandom. He even jokingly refers to his fandom as a disability and compares his friends and family needing to plan events around his matches to someone needing to plan events for the accessibility of a wheelchair-bound friend.

“It was only after Hillsborough, when outsiders began to take an interest in the way football conducts itself, that it became clear just how deeply entrenched in the football way of looking at things we had all become.” 

Following the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 fans were crushed to death, football in England was destined to change. While the Heysel tragedy, four years earlier, was attributed directly to hooliganism, the Hillsborough disaster was attributed to policing failures and overcrowding, but it was really determined that the stadiums across England were what needed to change most. Hornby discusses the recommendations made in the Taylor Report and the changes that came about because of the disaster in his essay titled “Hillsborough.” Hornby himself agrees with the Taylor Report recommendation that stadiums convert to all-seaters and do away with standing-only terraces altogether, but he points out that plenty of fans were against these changes because of the perceived damage that they might do to football culture and the possibility of rising ticket prices.