Easy to forget how little we football fans can affect the game | Football

Many fans follow football with absolute emotional commitment but quite limited information. That’s not a dig. Following sport is literally my full-time job and I can’t tell you whether Boreham Wood are home or away in the fourth round of the FA Cup assuming they get past Accrington Stanley. But I know lots of you could.

And the bitter truth is, no matter how many pairs of lucky pants you own or whether you have the same pint in the same pub every single home game all season, the progress of your team has absolutely nothing to do with you.

Treated mindfully, this could be quite a useful lesson – accept what you cannot change – but it doesn’t work quite like that.

As psychologist Martin Seligman learned from experiments with dogs, and later humans, when living beings realise they cannot affect what ails them, they give up. In such experiments, if humans know they are able to turn off an unpleasant noise in the place they’ve been given a task to do, they often don’t bother – but they still perform better than those who can’t.

Just knowing we can affect what’s happening to us improves our mental capacity. In football, real people become ciphers for the emotions we feel about a thing we cannot control. And as Antonio Conte pointed out this week: ‘In England there is a bad habit that there is only the coach to speak and explain. I’ve never seen a club or sporting director come here to explain the strategy, the vision of the club.’

In many people’s minds the manager becomes the club but realistically he is just a man doing one of many jobs in a complex ecosystem. We rail at him because it gives us a feeling of control – like we can change something.

And so it’s all #conteout #potterout #rodgersout. Despite the fact that stability is generally a better business decision than turmoil, and statistical analysis of the ‘new manager bounce’ has debunked its efficacy over the course of a season.

Tomorrow I will be covering the #managerout derby (David Moyes’ West Ham v Frank Lampard’s Everton) for the BBC. Everton Shareholders Association has called for a vote of no confidence in the board of directors.

While that is a far more productive use of their voices than shouting at Frank Lampard or Yerry Mina, ultimately, we as fans are powerless to affect what happens on the pitch.

But maybe soon we will hold a little more sway off it – 2023 is supposed to be the year legislation from the fan-led review of 2021 comes into play. Now that is something to yell about.