the tie that binds
fantasy football as a vehicle for male bonding
It’s a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century and I am still asked unprompted which football team I support.
This is the burden of a man with only a vague interest in the sport. Talking about football is a form of easy communality reached for by strangers around the world - and I’m no good at it. I have my standard answers, of course: I support Leicester City, my home team; I liked them before they were successful; I had a birthday party at Filbert Street; I even have a vintage match shirt. I’m no Mark Corrigan. But my heart’s not in it - they can tell.
I do quite like football, I promise. Those who take a viscerally anti-football stance are just as tiresome as the fanatics, and I strive not to be tiresome. But my fairly apathetic position does put me at odds with much of UK culture. Robert Shrimsley (a fan himself) recently described the “very clear and ever-deepening tyranny of soccer”, particularly evident in the midst of the Euros. And while his prescription for the apathetic - “make a virtue of how little you care” - strikes me as more likely to irritate than ingratiate, it’s hard to disagree with the diagnosis.
The all-consuming nature of football culture leads to some incongruous outcomes. One is that, for all my personal indifference to the sport, football forms the bedrock of my male friendships. But not real-life football: fantasy football.
For the uninitiated: fantasy football is a game in which participants select an imaginary team of real-life footballers, and score points based on the performance of those players. So, for example, if I select Martin Odegaard for my team, and the real-life player scores a goal in that weekend’s game, my team gets five points. Despite appearances, this is not a niche male interest like Warhammer or World War II cosplay: in 2023 there were over 11 million registrations for the Fantasy Premier League.
My friends and I have had a fantasy league for the last eight seasons, with a ‘draft’ league, where each individual footballer can only be owned by one of us, for the last six. And, bar one rogue season in which (with some external support) I finished second, I am generally kicking around at the bottom of that league come the final tally.
This is my own fault - I tend to select a poor team at the outset which sinks early in the season. I then don’t have the knowledge or motivation to improve my team through transfers or trades. A player who’s moved country in the January transfer window is liable to remain in my squad weeks after his departure because I haven’t read the news. A player with a season-ending injury, or who’s fallen out of favour with his manager, will lead my line. I sometimes fall on good fortune - I drafted Erling Haaland in his first season in the Premier League - but occasional luck doesn’t equate to the graft necessary to achieve success (such as it is) in fantasy sports.
So I stay around the bottom. In general, my aim is not to come last - in our league, certain punishments accrue to the overall loser of the season, on top of those inflicted on the loser of each game week. But the 2023-24 season recently ended, and I lost. In fact, I was 162 points from my closest rival.
I’m no fan of losing - so why do I do it? Because, to paraphrase Neil Gaiman, it’s not about the football: it’s what it means.
Male friendship is in a bleak state. In 2021, Daniel Cox diagnosed a male ‘friendship recession’ in light of research carried out by the Survey Centre on American Life. The study found that, since 1990, the number of US men reporting that they have no close friends has jumped from 3% to 15%. In the same period, the proportion of men who claimed to have at least six close friends dropped from 55% to 27%.
The UK is not America - but, sadly, its societal and demographic trends are broadly reflective of its former colony. A 2018 study by the Movember Foundation found that one in three UK men could not name a single close friend - results which were broadly replicated by a YouGov poll the following year.
All the research points in one direction: in an increasingly lonely world, men are generally the loneliest. This is, on any measure, a deeply sad reality. But on an objective, public policy level, it’s also very bad news. The health risks associated with loneliness are stark. In a 2020 update of his book Bowling Alone, the sociologist Robert Putnam concluded:
Over the last twenty years more than a dozen large scale studies […] in the United States, Scandinavia, and Japan have showed that people who are socially disconnected are between two and five times more likely to die from all causes, compared with matched individuals who have close ties with family, friends, and the community.
Even the most cursory research will lead you to articles confidently explaining that the reason for men’s loneliness is ‘toxic masculinity’ - men’s inability to articulate their emotions, to develop intimacy with others. While this could plausibly be the reason men have always had fewer friends than women, it doesn’t seem a credible explanation for the recent decline in male friendship. I don’t sense that men have become more toxic and less emotionally articulate in the last thirty years - in fact, quite the opposite. So why are we getting lonelier?
The true causes of the male friendship recession are harder to pin down - but societal atomisation must be one. In a tangible sense, we now have fewer opportunities than previous generations to make (and keep) friends: pubs and clubs are closing; organised religion is declining; we work long hours but routinely do so from home, having been forced to for almost two years during the pandemic. In the circumstances, it’s unsurprising that many men spend their weekends on the sofa, having parasocial relationships with sports teams and podcast hosts, only interacting with real people via Instagram likes.
The group of eight friends in my fantasy league met in our first year at university, some 13 years ago. Over that period, we have shared the trials and joys of growing up, of working out who we are, experimenting. Hair has been lost, weight gained, romantic partners have come and gone - and these developments have been logged in a WhatsApp group with an inexplicable title by which our friendship group has come to be known, the origins of which are long forgotten.
Bar two, we now live in London. But London is large, it sprawls - and so it lacks the serendipity factor of a more compact city; we don’t generally bump into each other. And our lives are busy. We have each of us settled into the grooves of adulthood: of work, renovations, weddings, stags, increasingly committed and intensive exercise regimes, holidays, visiting parents (who are aging). The first of us shortly to become a father.
No longer is one night a week spent in the basement of Phonox; midweek pints are arranged only rarely, perhaps when the sun is out; weekends are seldom wasted due to late nights and sore heads - weekend mornings are now seised for exercise, farmers’ markets, DIY, brunches, antenatal classes. For the most part, this feels comfortable, and happy. But the opportunities to get the guys together, to catch up, are fewer and harder to organise.
The demands of male friendship are fairly low. But those relationships do need maintenance and upkeep, otherwise they are liable to shrivel, rust, and ultimately die. It helps to have rituals, annual staging posts which force us to come together. Fantasy football provides that social scaffolding, the rhythms of the season producing natural occasions to meet: a draft day where we pick our teams for the year1, a Christmas dinner at which we each recount the highs and lows of the preceding 12 months, an end-of-season social with fines and prizes, and a ‘tour’ (essentially: a group holiday).
The league has supported our friendship group and those who make it up through break ups, family deaths, illnesses, and work setbacks. Its labyrinthine set of rules, fines, challenges, rewards - enforced by a leader who is by turns benevolent and cruel2 - are followed with tongues firmly in cheeks - but they are the glue of camaraderie, allowing us to keep in touch regularly and with little effort.
Fantasy football is not the basis of our friendship - but it is the crucial fuel by which it’s maintained. Without it, I doubt we would have fallen out - but we may have suffered the slower and equally painful phenomenon of drift, as relationships that were once convenient become less so, work is prioritised, families grow.
Friendship is the sum of the time spent together, your shared rituals and memories and stories - I may not care about football, but without the fantasy league that sum would be much reduced.
extra content
reading: on a holiday to Seville, some friends and I decided to have one-off book club. As some of the group are infrequent readers, we decided to go for something short, and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan was chosen. Keegan has one of the worst pound to page ratios of any contemporary author - I calculate that I’ve paid £20 this year for c.200 pages of her writing. The value is, however, excellent. Her prose is incredibly precise, economical and powerful. Give it a read.
watching: it’s a shame how rarely I take advantage of living in one of the world’s theatre capitals - but, bucking that trend, I saw Benedict Andrews’s adaptation of The Cherry Orchard at the Donmar Warehouse. On the basis of my recent experience of old Russian classics, I was trepidatious - but I needn’t have been. It was funny, cathartic, immersive and incredibly acted (funnily enough, the two TV actors - Nina Hoss and Adeel Akhtar - stole the show).
listening: after seeing her live at Bestival back in 2012, I hadn’t given much thought to Lucy Rose in the following decade. So I was surprised to learn she had a new album out - and more surprised that it is very good. This Ain't the Way You Go Out seems like a welcome departure from her previous (and now a little tired) folk rock style, with a bolder, more jazzy sound; it reminded me of Michael Kiwanuka’s journey from Home Again to his latest eponymous album.
eating: this month I’m helpfully reviewing two restaurants that everyone has been to and which have been reviewed to death - there’s a reason I don’t charge for this stuff… Anyway I went to Clerkenwell twice recently and visited St. John (an institution) and Brutto (a new-ish Russell Norman venture). Both were very lovely, and Clerkenwell is a lovely area. Tune in next month for more scintillating insights!
This comes with its own rituals, like sharp intakes of breath as you use an early pick to select a player widely rumoured to be leaving for the Bundesliga.
And who I should credit for the inspiration for this piece.
I thought that was a brilliant piece of writing which describes an isolation many men feel but don't express. He combines humour with a very serious point and underpins his ideas with interesting data. Bravo David!
This is wonderful!