Football fans are idiots. Passionate without a cause, loyal to a fault, fools in the face of truth and stupid enough to fall for the same tricks every time, every year.

To quote Sean Ingle (he wrote this 3 years ago):

After all, you remain hooked on a sport that has, over the past decade, become as competitive as a F1 warm-up lap - while at the same time taking ever-larger chunks out of your salary. Smart people would stand up to such exploitation. Football fans prefer to revel in their “hardcore” commitment.

Even if a match is shunted to some unholy hour to accommodate Sky, you think nothing of travelling hundreds of miles to sit in a stadium with all the atmosphere of a wake, to show loyalty to your club. The same club that’s always thinking of ingenious new ways to bleed you dry.

When it comes to football, your rationality goes awol. You worship players who are at best indifferent to you, and at worst despise you. If a referee makes a dubious decision against your team, he’s a wanker or a cheat. And if a journalist writes something you disagree with, he carries a vendetta.

I find it impossible to come up with an argument that counters what Sean says, apart from maybe the bit about players despising fans, but then again what players feel about the fans has very little to do with the fan experience in itself (unless your loyalty is based on how many times the players thank the fans in a season).

Football has evolved from merely being a contest of skill and ability to a money-making processor in which you stuff fans through one end and money comes out the other, with what’s left of our hopes and dreams efficiently disposed off through a waste tube somewhere along the start.

So what do we do? Do we stand up for our rights and turn away from the exploitation, as Sean suggests? Staying away from the grounds will not solve problems - it will merely force clubs to find new ways to raise money and cut costs, which can lead to certain clubs striking out their own TV deals, others to load themselves with even more debt, others (in extreme situations) to reduce ground capacity to manage expenses and still others to sell players and maybe even fold up and go bust.

In fact, I’m not sure any of Sean’s suggestions will have the right impact. Football taps into one’s emotional core - asking people to ‘widen their scope’ will only cause them to weaken their emotional attachments to the sport and / or bring in reason - sure-fire ways to turn people away from football.

On one thing Sean is 100% right - that fans need to stop buying into the hype that football generates. Of course, it’s not ‘football’ that’s generating the hype, it’s the media, the press, those who shape our knowledge of the world (football or otherwise) by choosing where to shine the spotlight. The same paper that Sean Ingle wrote this article in almost 3 years ago happily treads the fine line between rumour-mongering and biased story-telling, although they do it with far more subtlety than your average tabloid.

Football fans are idiots - and we’ll stay idiots until individually (not collectively) change occurs. Everyone must take responsibility for their own actions, and ensure not only that they’re not being taken along for a ride, but also that their actions are positively benefiting the sport and the people attached to it (as opposed to feeding the idiocy, as the press often does).