Losing Together
Three years ago, at the start of the regular Premiere league season, I did a very American thing and chose a club to support which I had absolutely no affiliations or connections to: the newly promoted Leeds United. A team with an underdog fight in them. I had been trying to find my club for a while, but just couldn’t get behind a top six team. If you do it too much, winning loses its pleasure.
I once heard a commentator say that, “To watch Leeds is to feel fully human.” The ups and downs of a Leeds game activates every single nerve in your body until you can no longer physically contain yourself—which may be the only explanation for Jesse Marsch’s famous air guitar moment after beating Liverpool earlier this season. The stress is enough to take years off your life, but the adrenaline is a drug that sustains you through loss after loss after loss. Air guitar moments have kept me blindly hopeful all season, but after last Saturday’s game against Everton I changed my tune. It’s time that I accept the imminent relegation.
There is literally nothing tying me to Leeds United except for a public declaration of support. And now as I watch my club in ANOTHER relegation fight, I have a feeling that I can only describe as loneliness. I’m happy to back a loser any day (someone’s got to!) but part of the comfort of losing is losing together. I’m here in my living room in Illinois, losing alone.
So, as I mentally prepare to follow Leeds back down to the Championship, I look forward to indulging in another distinctly American pleasure: watching my local Chicago Fire lose, among friends, with absolutely no consequences.