I’m a slow adopter of social media, but once I get going I tend to get a tiny bit carried away. It took me a long time to get the point of Twitter, but now that I understand its purpose completely and absolutely, I love it like I love cheese and pineapple toasted sandwiches. And what might that purpose be exactly? Well, it’s exactly this:
Sure, I had to beg for it rather shamelessly, but the holes in the knees of my jeans were totally worth it…
I also got one from my favourite New Zealand club:
Twitter has changed fandom for the better, I reckon.
It has made the relationships between fans and their clubs, not to mention those between fans and each other, more interactive. It has brought everyone closer together and allowed us all to get to know each other just that little bit more. This is especially true when your favourite club is on the other side of the planet.
It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, and even I admit there are downsides. Fans can be quite hard on each other when they disagree and some idiots use their relative anonymity to say nasty, hurtful things to players that they otherwise wouldn’t get the opportunity to say within earshot. And hey, some clubs even do it too!
But the benefits outweigh the negatives. For one thing, depending on how well your favourite club uses social media, you no longer have to feel like your relationship with them is all one way. You don’t have to be little more than a cash cow, who anonymously and unquestioningly trudges along to games, buys a hotdog and gets the latest replica shirt every year. You can feel like part of the family as well.
To us, a club’s Twitter account IS the club. It’s the club speaking to us and expressing its personality. A personality you might otherwise have never known existed. Sometimes a club’s online persona completely reinforces our perceptions of it:
It’s actually not THAT long a story… They. Got. Caught. Cheating. Four words!
Other times, clubs can really pleasantly surprise you. I think this is one of the classiest tweets of all time:
But then, on other occasions still, they can completely embarrass themselves:
The Phoenix went on to win 2-0…
At least Sydney FC can console themselves with the fact that these things can happen to the best of us. This, from Manchester City, was always going to be asking for trouble…
No prizes for guessing what the outcome of that was…
Of course, we couldn’t just leave it at that now could we?
Yeah, well, they have now haven’t they…
The truth is that, a lot of the time, clubs trying to do banter on Twitter just come across as a bit lame. Here’s an example to underline my point…
Ick! That’s the football equivalent of Melbourne flopping out their John Thomas and handing Perth a tape measure…
But in New Zealand, our clubs are small enough that Twitter banter takes on a completely different dimension. Rather than big multibillion euro corporations sparring via their highly paid communications advisors, it comes across more like a group of mates giving each other gip down at the local Cossie Club…
And it goes further than that. I doubt that there’s anything more New Zealand than two football clubs organising their national cup tie via Twitter…
They might as well be conducting negotiations across the fence in the back paddock!
But the real benefit of Twitter is it has given us the ability to talk about our obscure football fetishes with more likeminded people around the world than ever before, and it has made life richer as a result. For instance, thanks to Twitter I have forged friendships with other fans who live worlds away, and I have even enjoyed some of their company in real life as a result!
If you’re a football fan and not on Twitter, I suggest that you are missing out.
Categories: Media
Enzo Giordani
A grassroots football enthusiast based in Auckland, New Zealand, and a fan of the most magnificent club on earth - A.S. Roma. More info (including e-mail address) can be found here: https://in-the-back-of-the.net/about/
