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+How to Finally Divorce Your Toxic Sports Team
+
+Of all the relationships in life, none is more unrequited than the one we have
+with the teams we love the most. One writer learns how to extricate himself
+from the senseless pain and suffering of his fandom
+By [34]Tom Lamont
+April 15, 2025
+Image may contain François Walthry Book Comics Publication Adult Person Baby
+Face and Head
+Illustrations (throughout) by Zohar Lazar
+Save
+Save
+
+This story was featured in The Must Read, a newsletter in which our editors
+recommend one can’t-miss story every weekday. [37]Sign up here to get it in
+your inbox.
+
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+
+About a year ago, while watching his team lose a must-win game, a fan of the
+Dallas Cowboys named CJ Boyd removed his replica jersey, balled it tight, and
+hurled it off the balcony of his apartment in DeSoto, Texas. While his partner
+looked on, filming Boyd’s tantrum on her phone, he chased his floating jersey
+outside, where he picked it up to hurl it farther along the street. He was
+topless. It was winter. Boyd didn’t feel the cold, he told me, for misery. The
+clip of his outburst circulated online, and when I watched it I thought: Yeah,
+that captures it—the circular pain of a fully felt love for a sports team, the
+seeming impossibility of escape. In the video, Boyd marches up and down the
+street renouncing, then retrieving, the jersey, never able to throw it far
+enough to be free.
+
+When a spark has gone, lovers may separate and spouses divorce. Businesses are
+dissolved all the time without acrimony. Friends quietly stop texting one
+another. We abandon unsatisfactory jobs, apartments, political parties. Why
+should it be different with a team?
+
+Of all the many rules governing human behavior—stuff codified by law,
+etiquette, or religious decree to steady interpersonal relations—the only
+universal taboo I can think of that’s rational, legally sound, ethically
+neutral, yet carries the social equivalent of the noose is the ditching of a
+sports team. Among fans, there’s no excuse that will account for it. No exit
+papers or under-the-table permissions may be obtained. It’s bone-felt, beyond
+argument, and if you care to know anything about sports, you know that however
+degraded, bored, impoverished, or exhausted a fan may feel, their continued
+fidelity is expected, no matter what.
+
+In Michigan, a few years ago, it made its way from local to national news that
+a family, the Carpos, had decided to give up the Detroit Lions, tired of years
+and years of losing. It was a sensation, an outrage. When David Cameron was on
+the verge of being reelected British prime minister in 2015, commentators saw
+it as an awful portent that he could not seem to remember which fan base he
+belonged to: Hammers or Villans. Before the director Steve McQueen was underway
+on his name-making movie, 12 Years a Slave, he was fanatical about an English
+football team, Tottenham Hotspur. “I gave up football,” McQueen told an
+interviewer in January 2014. “It affected my day too much. It’s just stupid.”
+Within a couple months of that unusual admission, McQueen was the proud owner
+of an Oscar for best picture. A Tottenham fan myself—affected by it, made
+stupid by it—I imagined a cosmic link between the two events. In renunciation,
+McQueen seemed to have found peace, and reward.
+
+That was a decade ago, and also when I first started to dream about bailing
+out, imagining the many ways the emotion and ambition I wasted on a sports team
+might be better spent. I felt like a reasonably well functioning adult, a fun
+parent, a listening spouse, a reliable wage earner…. But only till about 3 p.m.
+on a Saturday, at which point I became a pacing, pink, grudge-holding bore with
+a fuse the length of a fingernail. I was perfectly prepared to obliterate all
+sorts of cheerful occasions with thermonuclear sulks about sporting contests I
+had no control over.
+
+I knew that lifelong fans, periodically swearing off, almost always came back.
+I dredged newspaper archives and the internet for examples of successful
+separations like McQueen’s, but there wasn’t much out there. In the 2010s, an
+English fan called Adam Thompson finally tired of his team, Wolverhampton
+Wanderers, and sought a parting. He registered a WordPress blog—How to Divorce
+Your Football Team: A Social Experiment in Leaving Your First True Love—and
+charted his efforts to begin again. There were field trips. Even flirtations.
+The blog fizzled out.
+
+When I contacted Thompson to ask what happened to his experiment, he told me he
+got cold feet. Boyd, the man in Texas, said that if the Dallas Cowboys were a
+girlfriend, he would have broken up with them years ago. But this was sports,
+where sticking it out or dying can seem the only options available to
+malcontents. Could anything be done?
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+There is a sentiment in Korean sport: The fan doesn’t choose the team; instead,
+the team chooses the fan. If this is true, then Tottenham took a roundabout
+route to get me. My dad grew up in Scotland. As a boy he cheered for Aberdeen
+FC, which occupies a crumbling redbrick stadium on the sandy banks of the North
+Sea. When he moved to London, he was a lonely provincial teenager in need of
+work and friends. He tried to assimilate in a hurry, and various severings of
+identity took place. He anglicized his accent. He told fibs about his
+upbringing. Out went the old team, and after he met my mother, he took up
+supporting Tottenham, whose players used to visit the special-needs school
+where she worked. That gesture was enough to plant something in him that he
+later planted in me. So we were Tottenham fans.
+
+For as long as I can think, my relationship with the team has been anxious,
+angular, a bit wrongheaded, a bit much. At the first live game I went to, a
+player from the visiting team turned to the home fans and threw out an arm in a
+fascist salute. He also mimed having a Hitler mustache. These were stunning
+gestures in a stadium full of Jewish North Londoners like me. Nothing has been
+neat or shapely about following the team since. Season after season, my dad and
+I ground our teeth and ground it out, celebrating some, chuntering more. He
+died in 2022, just days after the end of a reasonably successful campaign by
+our standards. My dad and I had enjoyed four, maybe five, such golden seasons,
+spread out over the 30-plus years we doggedly followed the team. Were they
+enough, the scattered good times?
+
+One of his mates came to his funeral wearing a Tottenham jersey. I remember
+thinking how odd it was, that a team could take root in someone’s identity to
+such an extent, finding purchase in my dad where religion, music, luxury,
+literature never did. I remember wondering as I said goodbye whether this was
+the time to say goodbye to our shared team too. By 2024 I was more determined:
+a parent to growing children of my own, children who watched me celebrate or
+pace the corridors of our home, mysteriously elated, inexplicably upset. I took
+my son to watch Tottenham play our loathed local rivals, Arsenal, and we fell
+behind 1-0, 2-0, then 3-0 in the first half. Gremlin-y Arsenal fans howled at
+us from their section. There was something in my son’s flushed face, a
+frustration that I had no power to relieve, that made me decide: enough.
+
+Fan to fan, we are conditioned to admire unconditionality, a devotion that’ll
+withstand any stress. The most exemplary fans are not the winningest or the
+most neatly coordinated, nor those that travel in large, uncomplaining packs.
+The exemplars are the undernourished loyalists who hang around when there’s
+little to no encouragement for them to do so. I think of Ron “Crackman”
+Crachiola, that immortally optimistic Detroit Lions fan, or that much televised
+booster of the New York Jets, Edwin “Fireman Ed” Anzalone, both of whom have
+clung on, costumed, hoarse, through actual decades of false dawns. Dawg
+Pounders with your heads in your hands at Huntington Bank Field, a stadium
+known in Cleveland as the Factory of Sadness: I see you too. Broadly, there is
+peer-to-peer sympathy for all of these franchises—Lions fans, Vikings fans,
+Sabres fans, Kings fans—and their collective centuries of waiting.
+
+We have to be impressed by such devotion. Me, I’m also put in mind of tales of
+prisoners or kidnap victims, so accustomed to their jails they might refuse a
+means of escape. Logic is not meant to be a part of the true fan’s equipment.
+Applying logic to our situations, 99 out of 100 of us would start a mighty bin
+fire, burning the keepsakes. I wish I’d asked my dad how he did it, severing
+himself from his boyhood team.
+
+Even without that guidance, resolutions took shape for me through the summer of
+2024. I needed to at least try to break it off, stop this reflexive way of
+thinking of the team as an extension of myself. When another season began in
+August, I refused friends’ offers of tickets. I kept away from screens during
+matches where I reasonably could. If I failed, I’d at least leave the
+beginnings of a trail, something for future escapees to follow.
+
+I stayed quiet on text chains and left WhatsApp groups—swearing off the
+bumblebee emoji, never expecting to be “buzzing” about a goal again. I
+accepted, glumly, that some of my friendships would suffer in the short term. I
+warned my only brother I’d be taking a holiday of indefinite duration from our
+team. What next? Actual holiday, putting miles between myself and the home
+stadium? Hypnosis? I thought I might try laughing at the whole situation. On
+paper, intense fandom is absurd.
+
+I reached out to an online comedian named Isaac Barron, who produces videos
+throughout the NFL season in which he plays a distraught sports fan. Tears
+streaming down his face, Barron pleads for release: “I can’t take this no
+more…. Every year I go through this…. I’m sorry about the TV.” Barron puts in
+such a persuasive performance that I had to call him out as a fraud. There’s
+legitimate pain here, I insisted. Barron, another Cowboys lifer, laughed. At
+least 50 percent of the anguish is legit, he said. Barron’s wife, Shannon, told
+me that he had ruined a date, years earlier, by hiding in his bedroom and
+crying over a loss. Sketch comedy was a compromise they’d dreamed up, a form of
+catharsis. “The tears come from the fan in me,” Barron said. “The actor in me
+pushes them.” He’d made himself find humor in what might otherwise be breaking
+his heart.
+
+If humor wasn’t my way out, maybe I could deaden myself with cool, professional
+distance. John Powers, a sportswriter at The Boston Globe, told me how he’d
+extricated himself from fandom: by becoming a sportswriter and forcing himself
+to turn neutral. His colleague Dan Shaughnessy, who grew up outside Boston and
+has written about the Red Sox for the Globe for over 40 years, said something
+similar. “If I’m covering a game, the Red Sox lose, I need to be able to tell
+the readers why they lost,” Shaughnessy told me. “When my head hits the pillow
+it doesn’t matter whether they won or lost, except for the story. I’m rooting
+for the story.”
+
+I had tried laughing, like Barron; now I tried rooting for the most dramatic
+narrative around my team, whatever that might be. It was a Sunday in October.
+Tottenham were playing away. We were up 2-0 at halftime and the best story,
+following Shaughnessy’s theory, would be a dramatic three-goal comeback by the
+opposition. When exactly that happened, it felt dreadful as always, an ache
+that made its way around the belly, groin, molars.
+
+I was at a family lunch that Sunday. My sister-in-law, a therapist, asked why,
+if I truly wanted out, I hadn’t sought counseling yet. Embarrassment wasn’t
+reason enough to keep dragging my feet. Googling, I came across a therapist
+named Christina DeCoux, who is based in Los Angeles. A particular sentence on
+DeCoux’s website caught my eye: “People often seek me out because they are
+feeling stuck in a painful emotional pattern that just won’t let go.”
+
+Image may contain Book Comics Publication Person Accessories Glasses Box
+Clothing Footwear Shoe and Cartoon
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+I booked a consultation with DeCoux and we spoke over video. I explained my
+predicament and we talked about what I might like to achieve. I said I just
+wanted to leave it all behind with some dignity on both sides, affectionate
+memories in tact. I wanted a happy divorce.
+
+I had just spent an afternoon with Ryan Ray, an insurance broker from England,
+who I thought might have the saddest story of any fan in the world. Ray and his
+mates followed their own boyhood club, Wimbledon FC, based for a century in
+southwest London, when it was moved by new owners to Milton Keynes, 60 miles
+north of London. Fans who decided to keep their allegiance local reinstituted a
+new club in the neighborhood called AFC Wimbledon. The old team that moved
+north became MK Dons, taking with it the players and, in theory, the status and
+history…plus Ray and a smattering of original fans. Supporters on either side
+of this angry divide insist it is the other lot who are the deserters. “I don’t
+open my mouth anymore,” Ray says. “ ‘Ah, who do you support, then?’ I don’t
+bother answering. It’s not worth the hassle.”
+
+Ray and I had come together to watch MK Dons play a cup game against AFC
+Wimbledon. Visiting fans traveled up in red double-decker buses, to emphasize
+their fundamental London-ness. In the stadium they sang a chant that ironically
+glamorized life in the capital (Champagne, cocaine, Ferraris) at the expense of
+the turncoats who’d left. “You’ve got bus stops and secondhand shops,” went one
+part of the chant, probably the nicest part. “Your clothes are shite and your
+haircut’s fucking weird.” As with many separations, dialogue had cheapened to
+insults, lists of bad traits, the once-unsayable things now exaggerated for
+maximum cruelty. After his team went down 1-0, then 2-0, Ray and I retreated to
+a windowless bar inside the stadium. “I look forward to it,” he said, “the six
+to eight weeks when I don’t have to focus on anything to do with this football
+club. I long for it.” Ray meant the offseason. “Sometimes I wish I could just
+sit there without any bias, without any interest—but it’s not me. I’m tribal.”
+
+I mentioned this idea of tribalism to the therapist, DeCoux. I explained my
+conviction that the saddest, bleakest parts of the fan’s experience—the
+exaggerated grievances, the shortsighted bragging, the narrow delusion of being
+exceptional—were the parts bound up in tribal feeling. She said that whenever
+she watched her own husband watch sports—he was a New York Rangers fan—she was
+sometimes put in the mind of religious cults. DeCoux was raised inside a
+rule-bound evangelical church. She left in her 20s and made cult recovery one
+of her areas of focus as a therapist. “You wouldn’t know what songs to sing
+unless you were a part of the group,” DeCoux recalled of her church. “You had
+to perceive what were the correct things to say. If you were ever off message,
+you could feel the energy shift.”
+
+She might have been describing any supporters’ pub in Newcastle or Bavaria; one
+of those stadium sections that are set aside for drum-banging, flares,
+ride-or-die piety. DeCoux continued: “Of course, the one thing you can’t say
+is, ‘I’m not sure I want to follow along with you guys anymore. I’m changing
+cults.’ Because that would be immediate social exclusion.” She described a
+commonly reported reason that people give for staying in cults: the sunk cost
+fallacy. “People can’t leave because they’ve spent so much time and money and
+energy,” she explained.
+
+I thought of Boyd, the jersey-throwing Cowboys fan, who described the NFL
+offseason to me as though talking through an obvious, yet completely
+irresistible, con. “Let’s say your guys get knocked out in January,” he said.
+“You’re pissed. You’re mad. I would guess that for the average fan it’s free
+agency when most of them start getting invested again. That piques the
+interest.” The seasonal reset creates a void. Optimism quickly fills it. The
+fan thinks, Maybe I’ll be a better member of this cult if I only believe
+harder, give over more of my money and my time. “Then roster cuts happen.
+Players get traded. It’s almost like a mind game, right? ‘Okay. This could
+work.’ And God forbid you have a good preseason.”
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+In November, DeCoux texted me to say she’d been pondering my case and she
+regretted likening it to extraction from a cult. The situation, she said, had
+more in common with addiction, the high highs, the low lows, the swearing-offs,
+the shame-inducing returns to the cookie jar. I was nodding. Could we talk?
+
+“There are a couple of ways I know of looking at addiction,” she said. “One is,
+you [follow the spirit of] a 12-step program. You go totally sober. You aim to
+be sober forever. A lot of people in addiction would say this is the only way.
+There are other branches of treatment, known as harm reduction, where a
+therapist meets a person where they’re at. They try to reduce the harm that a
+substance is causing.” The idea, she continued, is to help a client use less,
+with greater control and greater awareness. “I would ask you, when you feel the
+out-of-control feelings, what do you believe about yourself? I would want to
+know: Which feeling comes up strongest? Give me an ‘I am’ statement.”
+
+Smallness, I said.
+
+“ ‘I am small,’ ” repeated DeCoux. “So it’s really about feeling like a child.
+Completely out of control of your destiny. Powerless.” She considered this. “I
+would say, maybe, your connection is linked to old childhood beliefs that need
+to be examined. When did it become clear that this was an identity for you?
+What were the experiences that made you form an identity around this team?”
+
+I pondered it and told DeCoux that I found it hard to remember a time when it
+didn’t feel like a part of my identity. I couldn’t remember choosing tribes. As
+children, she said, we make a lot of meaning: “But if you don’t remember the
+meaning that was made, how do you even shift that? You have to go back. Find
+the meaning you made around the team.” There was always a rivalry dynamic, I
+said, between Tottenham and Arsenal, our North London rival. A sense of us and
+them; a big sibling/little sibling vibe. At my school there were Jewish kids
+and Greek kids. The Jews ended up in one class and the Greeks in the other. We
+were Tottenham, they were Arsenal. For seasons-long stretches at a time, all
+through my teenage years and into my 20s, Arsenal were the more successful of
+the teams. It was bad luck. It was agony.
+
+As an adult, I always lived in flats and houses in enemy territory, within
+earshot of Arsenal’s stadium. The schools in these neighborhoods are Arsenal
+hothouses. The babysitters get busy indoctrinating your kids as soon as the
+front door shuts. On match days, main roads chock up with Arsenal fans,
+identifiable beneath their colors, I always think, because of a smugness of
+bearing that must come from their being part of a fan base that’s had a nice
+time of it over the years—that expects more glory as its due. (American readers
+will be unconsciously balling their fists picturing the Belichick-era
+Patriots.) No Tottenham fan of my generation thinks of glory as a right.
+Tottenham fans take nothing for granted and they are keenly aware of the
+entitlement of other fan bases. Whenever Tottenham play Arsenal, a starved
+chippiness smacks up against spoiled lordliness.
+
+DeCoux would often talk about going back, in psychological terms, to the scene
+of the crimes. Had I ever been to a game in Arsenal’s stadium, for instance? In
+all these years, a lifetime, I hadn’t. And so, on an apocalyptic weather day
+that November, the sky dark with clouds, as if in judgment over a travesty, I
+went to sit among the home fans at Arsenal.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+There will have been so many Red Sox fans who died in October 2004, only days
+or hours before the team turned the tide in its American League Championship
+Series against the Yankees, setting up a first World Series title in 86 years.
+During darker times, their optimism gravely tested, the frightened fan wonders:
+Why did this team choose me? Why the post-Aikman Cowboys? Why the Tottenham
+team that contracted mass food poisoning in 2006 on the eve of its most
+important game in years? Why wasn’t I chosen by Steph’s Warriors, Schumacher’s
+Ferrari, Messi’s Barca? Winning fans never ask themselves such questions.
+Winning fans are amnesiacs. They forget the random flights of ball or puck, the
+bad-breaking weather, the dumb injuries that must have caused them misery in
+the past. They ascribe their better times to tactics, organization,
+culture—whatever, to “championship DNA” or “winning mentality” or a dozen other
+press-conference clichés. Uh-huh, thinks the Mariners fan, 48 seasons and
+counting without a maiden World Series appearance, hearing about championship
+DNA. Oh sure, think fans of the Knicks, the Kings, the Hawks, decades without
+an NBA title. Why didn’t we think to have a mentality that prioritized winning
+when it would matter instead of losing when it would hurt the most?
+
+Fans are pitiable if they try to ditch a team and damned absolutely if they
+ever try to swap. And yet players, coaches, even owners are permitted to drift
+between teams as opportunity or profit dictate. Magic Johnson, always a Lions
+fan, cheered on that team’s recent playoff defeat by the Washington Commanders,
+of which he owns a minority stake. Presidents have been quick to pardon
+themselves for straying. Nixon supported one NFL team while playing footsie
+with another. (You understand that I’m a Washington fan, he told Don Shula, the
+coach of the Miami Dolphins. “But I’m a part-time resident of Miami and I’ve
+been following the Dolphins real close….”) At around the same time, in the
+early 1970s, a young Bill Clinton, besotted with his college girlfriend, added
+Hillary’s Chicago Cubs to his own St. Louis Cardinals (bitterest of rivals) as
+the baseball teams he rooted for. Jimmy Carter switched from the Yankees to the
+Braves in the mid-1960s after they relocated to Atlanta and never looked back,
+though the exchange left him in the championship red over the rest of his long
+life—two World Series titles to the Yankees’ seven. As a boy, the director
+Spike Lee gave up the Mets for the Yankees. Again, those many, many titles.
+
+Most fans stick, and if they don’t, they stay quiet. The Carpos, that family in
+Michigan who ditched the Lions, made the news because they’d elected to support
+the Kansas City Chiefs instead. Of all the eras in Taylor Swift’s life, one
+remains creatively underexplored: the time before she was a Chief, when she was
+an Eagle. There is a fascinating page on NamuWiki, the Korean-language
+Wikipedia, that outlines the philosophical case against abandoning one’s team.
+The act is known in Korea as 팀 세탁—team laundry—and it is understood to
+involve a paradox. You care enough, you want to put an end to your suffering.
+You care enough, you can’t. “If you have blue eyes,” said Shaughnessy, the
+sportswriter, “you have blue eyes.”
+
+From my own empirical research, it does seem the body understands if denial is
+in play, that a sacrament is under threat. Sitting in the chilly stands at
+Arsenal, I fidgeted and sweated, feeling well beyond the pale. Next to me there
+was another displaced fan, a woman named Liubov Liushnenko, from Ukraine.
+Liushnenko’s swings in team allegiance had been so intense, I soon felt ashamed
+of my own discomfort. She was raised in the Ukrainian capital, the only
+daughter of a devout Dynamo Kyiv fan. Liushnenko baffled her father by becoming
+a fan of Dynamo’s hated rivals, Shakhtar Donetsk, who played 450 miles away, in
+the Donbas region. Her dad wanted to know why she’d made the decision. “I
+couldn’t explain,” she told me “I still can’t. If you love something you can’t
+explain.”
+
+Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine changed Liushnenko’s life. She lost her job
+and lost friends to the army or migration. Before long she was persuaded by her
+parents to seek asylum in England. Staying in lodgings outside London, “I felt
+completely lost,” she said. Streams of Ukrainian football games, watched from
+her bedroom, helped. And over time it was football that made her feel more at
+home in her adopted country. She started playing for a lower-league team and
+took work as a coach for a charity called Fair Shot, which helps refugees find
+a place in English communities through football. Liushnenko took out her phone
+and showed me pictures of her parents. “I wanted to go back for New Year but my
+parents said no, not now. There’s no electricity. No heating. It’s a bad time.”
+
+In the Arsenal stadium, pre-match theatrics were underway. The Clash’s “London
+Calling” rang out with its snarling lyric about battle and war. Fireworks
+popped on the grass and the air around us filled with the sharp smell of
+gunpowder. Liushnenko said that in Ukraine, the war had brought about a shock
+truce between the fans of Shakhtar Donetsk and Dynamo Kyiv. “When part of your
+country is occupied,” she said, “you cannot be enemies with each other. You
+cannot be enemies with yourself.”
+
+We watched most of the match together, then I snuck out after halftime, feeling
+incongruous and grubby in that environment, chastened as well by Liushnenko’s
+example, trying to hear the right lessons in her story. Traveling home, I
+thought of what the therapist had said about us trying to cut certain cords
+that bound me to my team, working against negative feelings of anger, shame, or
+regret while retaining other, more positive associations: acknowledging the
+good. “I would want to see you go through a cycle of anger, then acceptance,”
+DeCoux said, “then get to some appreciation of what the team has done for you.”
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+It was obvious that I couldn’t just choose another team in the Premier League
+to support. But casually, that fall—just having some fun on the apps—I started
+seeing other sports. I watched YouTube reels of the World Series–bound Dodgers
+and dabbled in a trial subscription with the resurgent Knicks. When work took
+me to Hamburg, I showed up in the city’s pungent arena to watch its much-loved
+handball team. I texted the therapist: “We’re winning 6-5, I think. There’s a
+mascot dressed as a Dole banana.” Except when balls were successfully thrown
+into goals, I had no fucking idea what was happening, why we groaned as fans,
+why we regained our faith or sensed blood. I couldn’t follow the mysterious
+waves of belief and dread that take hold of people when a team matters so much
+to them they know its every mood, all blind spots, all flaws.
+
+Around then, the Jacksonville Jaguars came to London to play an international
+game at Wembley Stadium. I showed up to sample the visiting NFL circus. Agents
+of a seductive Americana had been sent overseas to tempt in new fans. For an
+hour, I joined in with other mesmerized Londoners as we yelled locally flavored
+endearments at the Jaguars quarterback Trevor Lawrence. “G’wan, Trev! Get in,
+Trevah.” Floridan cheerleaders tried their best to look like they wanted to be
+dancing under drizzle in a stadium that’s usually configured for English
+football. Bros in tracksuits bazooka-ed T-shirts at the crowd. The men behind
+me were doggedly checking Premier League scores by phone, grumbling about the
+consequences for their fantasy teams. It was a novelty to be able to drink in
+our seats, an indulgence imported from overseas, and people got very drunk. Our
+section started to smell like a wet ashtray.
+
+As the Jags pulled away, my attention started roving around the stadium. I’d
+been here often in support of Tottenham and I found old landmarks, picked at
+old wounds. Down there. That was where I sat to watch a 5-1 annihilation in a
+can’t-lose semifinal. Up there, in the eaves. That’s where I closed my eyes
+while Lionel Messi and his Barcelona teammates ate us for dinner. The
+humiliations lingered keenly. The losses were more alive in memory than the
+wins. I realized that having begun this trial separation, having started to
+make strides toward indifference, I was starting to miss the pain.
+
+DeCoux was interested to hear it at our next session, though not greatly
+surprised. Look at the faces of people at sports events, she said. Look at what
+they do with their bodies, the tactility, the tears. Sport seems to open up a
+rare space for people, especially men, to emote in public. It gives people a
+way to indulge what they might otherwise be suppressing—grief included.
+
+Image may contain Art Cleaning Person and Painting
+
+One weekend, I traveled to Aberdeen in Scotland where my dad grew up. I had a
+ticket to watch his boyhood team. Maybe there were answers for me
+there—compatible blood. Policemen frisked us at the stadium gate, checking
+pockets, checking socks. One teenager had a bottle of beer pulled out of his
+hood. At least a hundred men were smoking in a tight, high-walled gully that
+ran between the outer ramparts and the stands.
+
+I had a place in the hard-core section. Beside me, an elderly man, about the
+age my dad would have been, ate two chocolate bars and a bag of cheese crackers
+in silence, methodically tossing the empty packaging at my shins, possibly in
+provocation. I opened and ate a KitKat, also in silence, adding to the litter
+under my feet, a bid for acceptance that seemed to work. Soon a huge
+white-and-red flag was dragged over our section. A fan with a bass drum started
+up a regular thump, about the rate of an excitable heartbeat. As enthusiasm in
+the stadium began to grow, the flag was whipped away at just the moment the
+fans around me burst into song. The drumming and the singing did not let up
+till halftime. The home team, my dad’s team, played with flair, winning
+handsomely, and the terrace chants echoed in my head for hours afterward. I
+walked away along the seafront, eating a mince-and-oatmeal pie, his favorite.
+
+It was an ideal evening of sport. As meet-cutes go, the circumstances could not
+have been more propitious for second love if the whole thing was scripted by
+Austen or Ephron. I came away stimulated, all my senses fed, glad to have made
+the pilgrimage. When I asked my heart a question, whether it could love this
+other team, the answer was unequivocal, as clear as the drum: No chance.
+
+While I was in Scotland, I texted Adam Thompson, the Wolverhampton Wanderers
+fan who’d written the divorce blog all those years ago. In the end, not only
+did Thompson renew his vows, he sealed them in ink—he now has a W.W. tattoo—as
+if in apology for straying. CJ Boyd has team tattoos of his own: massive,
+palm-size Dallas Cowboys stars on either pectoral. Try divorcing those. I would
+suggest that—with respect to Spike Lee, the Carpos in Michigan, and at least
+three former US presidents—the swappers are outliers. You can’t choose the
+team. The team chooses you.
+
+━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
+
+It was January. My team hobbled into another new year, embarking on a
+historically terrible run, oblivious as to whether I was following the endless
+carnival or not. A friend had coined the term “low-power mode” (as when your
+iPhone downshifts to suck up less energy) to describe my renegotiated
+commitment to Tottenham, and I seized on his words like serious praise. What
+would seem a blunt desertion to some, a fuss over nothing to others, felt to me
+a small, treasurable achievement. On the night of a bad loss to Arsenal, I
+wasn’t there, I wasn’t pacing in front of a screen; I was out at dinner with
+friends. We spoke of Zuckerberg and Musk, ceasefires and wildfires. Los
+Angeles’ NFL teams had lost in the January playoffs, as though making dignified
+withdrawals to focus on more important matters. Perspective, if you wanted it,
+was easily found that month.
+
+“You can never just leave something completely behind. It’s always a part of
+you,” DeCoux had told me. That was the day her son wandered in, mid-session, to
+say goodbye to her before leaving for school. The three of us fell into
+conversation. DeCoux explained that we were discussing “sport and feelings,”
+and the boy made a brilliant noise, a weary groan with a rising note at the
+end: really? He was at the outset of his own journey as a fan, with a curated
+roster of teams he loved. I asked if he followed English football and he said
+he did. He had even picked out a team.
+
+“You’re kidding,” I said, when he told me which one. “Why us?”
+
+The boy gave a few reasons. It wasn’t important. Why anyone?
+
+I notice now that I’d made unthinking use of that word us. Months later, did I
+feel the same? DeCoux had warned that, from all she knew of helping cult
+leavers, separating couples, and addicts in recovery, forswearing could be
+difficult. She suggested I might work toward a more realistic goal of peaceful
+coexistence. In her own case, she no longer felt angry toward the cult that
+raised her, only distant. In my case, I might consider it progress if I could
+walk past Tottenham’s stadium, my old Tottenham pubs, and think: Good for them.
+
+At the end of the month, I walked from enemy into friendly territory, trying my
+hardest to recategorize the landscape as neutral, scrubbing it free of tribal
+lines. I walked a few miles to Tottenham’s stadium, passing landmarks dear to
+me: Seven Sisters station; the High Cross pub; Tottenham Bagels; the clock over
+the old Whitbread brewery, the one without hands or numbers—a grimly
+appropriate symbol, I always used to think, as frustrating seasons amassed.
+Like a chain-smoking ex-lover, lingering on some significant curb, I stood
+outside the Beehive bar, remembering bouncing up and down with pure joy as
+other delirious fans ripped plywood paneling off the walls, wanting keepsakes.
+
+It was midafternoon. A match was scheduled for the evening. Stewards were
+beginning to drag fencing into the traffic-free zone beyond the
+discount-sportswear shop. A burger chef in team colors was fixing a tablecloth
+into place on the pickle station next to Chunky Chips. The keenest fans were
+assembling, hours early, muttering to one another on public benches, treating
+nerves with tinned beer. Good for them, I thought.
+
+Tom Lamont is a GQ correspondent.
+
+A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of GQ with
+the title “Hi, my name is Tom and I’m addicted to the senseless pain and
+suffering of being a sports fan.”
+
+[38]
+Image may contain Ben Affleck Advertisement Poster Formal Wear Clothing Suit
+Adult Person Accessories and Tie
+[39]Tom Lamont is a GQ correspondent. He is a frequent contributor to the
+Guardian's Long Read desk and the author of the novel Going Home. He lives in
+north London with his wife and two children. ... [40]Read more
+
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+[39] https://www.gq.com/contributor/tom-lamont
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