Random Club Affiliation: Part 1, Aesthetics

By: Dan | August 13th, 2009

A behavior that most, if not all, fans engage in is the development of an affinity or an aversion to clubs that have little or nothing to do with their ‘regular’ club based on seemingly random reasons. The world of football is far too vast to follow impassively. I actually began an abortive attempt to discuss the adoption and repulsion of random clubs before I realized that the various criteria that sway our opinions are, themselves, too vast to cover in a single piece of writing, and that it would be better to write about these reasons individually.

The first basis for random club affiliation I would like to work with is the development of an opinion based on aesthetics, i.e. the club’s crest and/or kit. It’s safe to say that pretty much everybody has strong opinions on this subject. I’m not readily familiar, however, with how many cases of artistic value judgments making the leap into a definitive personal opinion of a club there are. I recall reading about someone’s dislike of Arsenal inspired by their classic red and white shirts, but that’s all that springs to mind currently.

While watching Hertha-Hanover on Saturday, I was somewhat perturbed when I noticed that Mainz had taken the lead against Leverkusen. Simply put, I do not like Mainz at all. The odd thing is that before I actively disliked Mainz, the only thing I ever thought about them was how awful their crest is. For the record, Mainz do have one of the worst crests in football; it takes several viewings just to make sure that it does, in fact, form an M and not a cryptic inverted peace sign or Y. I know that my personal dislike of Mainz has no basis in historical rivalry or recent grudge; I just cannot stand the sight of their crest, and over the years this has grown into a dislike of the entire club.

On a more positive note, I’ve come to like French club RC Strasbourg based entirely on their crest. Strasbourg are, currently, a club that intermittently bounces between Ligue 1 and 2; even in their days as a solid member of the first division, they weren’t exactly the highest profile club. Furthermore, it must be, at the very least, five years since I’ve seen one of their games. This all irrelevant though. In the 1990s, Strasbourg revamped their crest, which featured a stork and the city’s cathedral. The new crest was a striking, modern design which featured an abstract pointed, crescent image, inside of a circle, which was supposed to represent both the stork and the cathedral. The modernist redesign proved massively unpopular, and the club has since reverted back to the traditional design, but their relatively brief flirtation with abstraction has got me looking out for Strasbourg’s results to this day, even though I couldn’t name their current squad if you paid me.

The mechanics behind these opinions are certainly an interesting thing to ponder, because there are, naturally, many more instances of reactions to the aesthetics of a club not influencing the overall opinion about it. I’ve always liked Grasshopper Zurich’s visual identity, for instance, but I can’t say that I’m at all bothered about their on-field results.

I wonder if the opinion is something that takes immediate hold in the viewer, because reactions to art are personal and often instinctual, for lack of a better word. The alternative, I suppose, would be that the attachment to or dislike of a club in this situation is a kind of learned behavior. We do not start off with an intention of deciding to like or dislike a club based on aesthetics, but when we see the club paired up, in the real world, with other clubs, this flimsy impression is stronger than no impression at all and conditions us against the club. Germany and France being home to leagues that I follow closely on a week to week basis does give some credence to the learned behavior aspect.

I guess there’s no definitive conclusion to be drawn here, other than the one about me having too much time on my hands, but if anyone has their own examples of liking or disliking a club in this way, I would love to hear them.