If you think there’s something strange about all this, you’re right. There’s something about Aussie rules footy is too much, that drives people to the edge of sanity. It produces suffering and joy, and an insatiable hunger for more. You can hear it in the roar of the crowd, in the thunders of triumph, the cries of distress, the howls of frustration and in the continual cycle of pleas, curses and cheers. It is there in the bodies that ride the game with the players: fists clenching, legs trembling, guts churning, eyes that long to look away but cannot.

Mad, fevered, obsessed, fanatical, addicted. These are just a few of the words routinely invoked to describe Aussie rules barrackers by critics and fans. It’s as if the strange passions of footy followers are pathological. And perhaps they are. For barracking is grounded in love. And love is the emotion most associated with excess—with extravagant devotion, extremes of trust and paranoia, and crimes of passion when it all goes wrong.

Yet footy followers are not driven mad by a single love. They are driven mad by a series of intertwined loves. First, there is the love that footy devotees freely name: the love of the club. This is an infatuation that binds fans to their club. It somehow leads barrackers to feel they are part of the club and that what happens to the club happens to them. This is a love of belonging: the club becomes a higher self, something that represents fans and connects them to the players (who are loved, and sometimes hated, in turn), so that every result is taken personally and fans are driven to comments such as ‘we had a very good year’, ‘they absolutely destroyed us’, and ‘I hope we smash them’.

This imagined connection to the beloved club might seem bizarre enough, a naive union or a grand illusion. But there is a second type of love at play that lends a dynamic, intense and sometimes explosive character to the lives of footy followers. This is the love of the premiership. Not a unifying love, it is the lust for something that seems missing, the lack of which is all consuming. It’s a love that inspires a quest. Like the Lady wooed in the tales of courtly love, the premiership cup gleams with promise, tantalising fans with the possibility of an ultimate fulfilment at once familiar and forever out of reach. Obstacles are important, challenges essential, for the thrill lies as much in the chase of something that only the very best can win. But such pursuit comes at a cost, as the historian Denis de Rougemont explains:

The result is a seasonal cycle of anticipation and nerves, tension and release. All of which usually ends in a loss of some kind when the beloved club either crashes out of the finals after a defeat, or worse still, misses the finals altogether. Yet this recipe for suffering is also a recipe for excitement, dreams and fears. And the coming of the finals ramps this up a notch for those lucky enough to follow one of the clubs to have made it this far.

Notes:
1. Manning Clark, ‘An Entire Nation Stricken with a Strange Infirmity’, in Fitzgerald and Spillman, p. 226. Back to article

2. Denis de Rougemont, Passion and Society, trans. Montgomery Belgion, Faber, London, 1956, p. 15. Back to article