On missing the emotional side of football

We're more mobile than we were in the 19th century, when being a football fan was being codified, and that has ramifications for those of us who move around.

The fact that football supporters are the way we are is fundamentally rooted in the time during which we first came into existence. Football was a creation of an unholy union of the upper classes and the industrial revolution. Prior to the coming of the railways, merely to get from one town to another required a horse. It required an effort. Trains changed that forever.

But still by the late Victorian years, beyond those who had already flocked to the cities in search of work, people didn’t move from town to town in the way that they do nowadays. The idea of your club through thick and thin was much easier at a time when many people were unlikely to leave the town or city in which they were born that often. But trains did offer that mobility to teams for matches. They made a national football league feasible.