The personal history of a Chelsea Fan

Is it possible to support a sports team and learn nothing from it? Yes, but if you engage with the sport and ask questions about why things happened, why players moved clubs, you’ll be forced to learn organically about a huge spread of things.
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Often, sport and academic ability are separated in children. Sporty kids support football teams, nerdy kids have favourite Pokémon. The dominant mental image of a serious football fan is still likely an angry bald man with a pie. These two factors combine to create a less-than-genius view of the act of giving your child a team to get behind. Even ignoring any life lessons in psychology and dealing with defeats, this misses the amazing gateway to the world that sports can provide.
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I’ve had a friend who failed GCSE Physics explain to me in depth why spinning a cricket ball leads to more turn at lower speeds, how Magnus effect influences flight and trajectory and how weight transfer can be used to hit the ball further. Nearly every football fan I know well does not have any qualification in Economics but can explain to you amortisation, and how Chelsea used it cunningly to evade financial loss limit regulations with extra-long contracts. My favourite cricket journalist, Jarrod Kimber, once said that one of the great things about sports journalism is that you learn to become so many other things. He commented that to write what he writes, he has had to learn about performance-enhancing drugs, race and class issues, geopolitical events, finance and gender. (Unfortunately, this was on a live stream, for which I have lost the VOD) I would argue that this is not just true of sports journalism, but also of committing to being a serious sports fan.
​ This piece really is a recognition of all that I gained growing up supporting Chelsea football club. (an inexplicable choice I committed to at age 4) I also would argue that sports now are more technical and off–field information–heavy than they have ever been, expanding the learning opportunities for future generations.
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Just as I was picking Chelsea to support, before I could do times tables, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich bought out the club. You may forgive me for, at the time, not reading the news articles about the controversial new big investor. The first non-football lessons I remember being taught by the club came from the African Cup of Nations. I tuned in to watch my club’s heroes, Michael Essien (Ghana), John Obi Mikel (Nigeria) and Didier Drogba (Ivory Coast/Cote D’Ivoire). To my parents, I asked questions like “Why do their best players all play in the Premier League?”, “Where is Namibia?”, “Why are some of these teams so much better than the other ones?”.
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Through these questions, 6-year-old me was introduced to the idea that in Europe, we have the large revenue needed to bring the best players to our leagues, the relative populations of giants like Nigeria versus minnows like Namibia, and countless flags.
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At some point around this age, perhaps earlier, I would stare at league table points each week when they updated and think about permutations. “4 points behind Manchester City, so we need to win two weeks in a row and have them draw twice to catch up”, “Bolton are 8 points above relegation, so that’s 2 wins and 2 draws, or 3 wins, or 1 win and 5 draws”. This type of maths may seem rudimentary, but it’s the gateway into looking at players’ average goals per game, teams’ mathematical odds of winning things and the analysis of possession percentages, shots on target ratio and assessing which players have proved worth their signing fee and which have not.
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Why do small clubs love getting away matches against big clubs in the FA Cup? This question was one of my earliest forays into the finances of football (ticket income was mandated to be split 50/50 in the FA cup, meaning these small sides could get the income for selling 30,000 seats of Old Trafford, compared to their normal few hundred tickets per game that aren’t more than a few pounds each).
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I won’t bore you with 100 examples, although I could provide them, but non-extensively:

• Football contracts introduced me to contract laws and regulations
  

• Through the unpopularity of my club, I learned what an oligarch was in primary school
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• The transfer window introduced me to statistics and game theory
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• The complex nature of cricket taught me about matters of friction, air resistance and other facts of physics well before they came up in the classroom
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• Ticket prices and the Financial limits placed on football clubs taught me about optimal pricing strategies, amortisation and how companies can deliberately operate at short-term losses for long-term gains
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• The dominance of the English game (and indeed which countries play cricket) taught me from a very young age about how colonialist events of the past still strongly influence culture and money today
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I would like to recognise that you can avoid all of these things, you can raise a football fan who just watches the players kick the ball, and says they are rubbish when they miss and great when they win. However, sport fosters curiosity, and if you have the people and resources around you to answer your questions, you will become versed in all sorts of skills. For this, I have to at least partially thank my parents; no doubt their sports viewing experiences would’ve been more relaxing without a child asking them why Sudan plays badly, and Belgium are good and why players the commentators say have African passports are playing for France.
​ Once you’ve lived this long enough, you will know your CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport) from your CAR (Central African Republic). You will learn of the despotic dictator of Equatorial Guinea, who was football mad, and discover that scientists still disagree on why and how you can make a cricket ball swing sideways in the air. You will find yourself watching a YouTube video on the widespread corruption in Tajikistan, or a documentary on how France uses its version of the FA Cup to promote the nation’s unity with its overseas territories like Reunion Island and French Polynesia.
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Only when you are this deep into it all can you step back as a young adult and realise: committing to supporting and understanding Chelsea FC was the most nerdy thing I could’ve done, aged 4.