Phew! Being a football fan is quite time-consuming, isn’t it, when you have a full-time job and a freelance career and an interest in things other than football? Anyway, I am all caught up now on what the Ham is up to now and am avidly awaiting Sunday’s match against Spurs, which is apparently a ‘London derby’.

Now, this game is taking on particular resonance for me since this week I have been having a spirited discussion with a dedicated Spurs fan who wrote to me to complain that West Ham is a terrible team to support due to their long-standing rivalry, which is in part spurred by racism. Racism! I had no idea and I am very troubled by this.

But then I did a little more research and discovered, of course, that Spurs fans have been similarly charged (and this in addition to a story a man I dated for a while told me about how he and a friend shopped some fellow Spurs fans who were shouting racial epithets to the stadium ushers…only to realise that they had to sit next to them for the rest of the season as they had season tickets). But what this made me think about as well was the way in which selecting a football team is driven in part by a desire for group identity.

 But then identifying with a group as large as a group of supporters of a single team is intrinsically risky because there will always be smaller sub-groups within the group who you don’t identify with – and you’ll then have to spend an awful lot of time defending the fact that you don’t actually wish to associate with those members of the group, which takes up a lot of energy when you could be, I don’t know, reading newspaper articles about how much money the manager is aiming to spend to secure a new player before the trading window closes. Which is apparently something that football fans like to do when they’re not being racist or denying that they’re racist.

I think that’s partly why I’m generally not in to groups at all.