This should be a time of great optimism for football supporters – you are excused, Sheffield Wednesday supporters – but also one with a lot less actual football than normal.
As such, the mind can wander and stray over the summer months and you find yourself refreshing news aggregator websites to read five cryptically-phrased headlines about your club that it turns out all relate to the same player.
So we are here to help with some survival rules of our own. Admission: I have broken at least six of these…
1) You are allowed to attend a pre-season match
So much of football seems to matter a disproportional amount these days, to the extent that watching and following your team becomes enjoyable only in the exact moments of post-goal (VAR checks, notwithstanding) and post-win euphoria. Even those can be shortened by the tenet of “Yeah but what’s next” that increasingly seems to suffocate some fans.
Pre-season is a time to avoid this but it’s also football at its most relaxed. You can go along to a local non-league team, with matches on most nights of the week within a 30-mile radius, stand in the warm evening sunshine with a refreshing drink in your hand and watch football without a care in the world about the result.
To some, that will render the whole thing meaningless (and that’s fine, they simply won’t go). To others, the meaningless produces a distinct joy of its own.
2) You are allowed to attend your own team’s pre-season matches…
Supporting a football club is addictive and can be brilliant – the rare spikes of euphoria are why we bother at all. But just as watching meaningless non-partisan football contains its joy, so too does watching your own team play when your mood is not determined entirely by the course of the day.
There’s also something fun about seeing football that exists halfway between a training session and a competitive match.
No footballer wants to lose and no footballer will stop trying completely, but your team can try new tactical tweaks, give minutes to academy players that you have never seen play and gradually roll out new signings. Also: the warm sunny evening thing.
3) …but there are strict rules here
This is really quite basic, but I broadly think that if you have a tendency to treat a pre-season friendly like a league game, both during and after, it’s probably not a great idea for you to go to them. Give that nervous mind a break – you’ll only overreact – better or worse – anyway.
4) Extra points if you ‘accidentally’ time it with a summer holiday
“How come you’re packing your shirt?”
“Weird, you’ve never expressed an interest in going to Portugal’s coast/Devon/Austria/Indonesia before”
“Why can’t we book dinner for Wednesday evening?
“Surprised at how many people you knew near the departure gate”
“Oh for fuc…”
5) If you’re not there, final score only
The majority of supporters don’t go to pre-season matches (obviously) but it’s perfectly acceptable to care about them. We don’t get to turn off emotions and if our team is playing in a conkers championship we’d still want them to win.
But if you’re not there and the game isn’t streamed live (which I think is perfectly fine to watch as long as you follow No 3), my advice is: don’t look out for live updates.
Read a match report, see what your club correspondents think and watch the highlights – all good. But don’t sit on social media reading commentary, or have a live score app open to do the same. I promise it’s not worth it.
6) See the process, not the result
The general rule here is: if the manager really cares about the result, so should you.
At the start of pre-season – in fact: almost all of pre-season – your club’s manager cares only about building fitness, extending upon things that have been worked upon in training, working out a vague hierarchical order of fringe squad players and acclimatising new signings with their squadmates.
Is your new forward scoring four times, or your new centre-back looking comfortable when receiving passes from the goalkeeper and playing the ball between the lines a good thing? Obviously. But losing 3-1 to FC Spanish Second Tier isn’t a bad one. I promise.
7) Don’t become a scout unless you’re a scout
The rise in available (paid and non-paid) data and analytics on footballers, and the depth of leagues for which that data can be sourced, has both democratised the scouting industry and also allowed for amateur enthusiasts to provide information to supporters. None of this is any issue at all.
But I urge – and believe me, I am very guilty of this – supporters not to form their own one-person recruitment system where they try to work out who their club “should” sign.
However much effort you put in, I can almost guarantee that any player you come up with will already be on a list, or database, that your club has access to. And if they don’t, they’re deeply inefficient and you’ll just get wound up anyway.
8) If it has techno music, avoid
There is a video on YouTube – I found it randomly, this is not an agenda against him – entitled “Harry Cardwell – Goals, Skills & Assists | HD”. Cardwell is a 28-year-old footballer for Forest Green Rovers who started 15 times in the National League last season.
The point is this: professional footballers are very good at football. If you cannot make a highlights package that makes a professional footballer look good, you can’t make videos. So watching those packages of your new signing means absolutely nothing because their success or failure will be determined by a multitude of factors that won’t be contained in the video.
And yes, the obsession with hard-house techno over football highlights videos is one of culture’s great mysteries.
9) Know your transfer experts
Never before have we seen more of how the sausages are made. Every piece of information you hear about a potential transfer is leaked by or through someone for a reason: agent, player, selling club, buying club.
That does not mean that this news is not worth reporting (it’s clearly a worthwhile and successful profession) nor that any of it isn’t true. But there are so many moving parts that you could drive yourself mad taking notice of it all.
My advice (and this is far easier if you support a smaller club): have a select group of journalists/outlets that you use for your information, consisting of club/region experts and the most respected journalists who get national or international stories. Create a group of them on social media. If anything concrete (or setting concrete, I guess) happens with your club, they will make sure that you are kept informed of it.
10) Get excited about transfers
You can obviously care too much about transfers – most of us (including me) have used the phrase “winning the window” and been made to look stupid – but you are also allowed to get excited about them.
The notion of solemnly refusing to engage until the first day of the season, looking at the squad list and being surprised by the new names, is a non-starter. The game generated a desperation culture fuelled by capitalist rush that made us this way.
If your club is showing ambition, solving obvious problems or signing players from a new market, be excited. Nobody is campaigning for crowing arrogance, but history shows us that July and August can be the only times when optimism is even possible.
11) Only play Fantasy Football if it won’t become >30 per cent of your personality
I’ve done it; I’ve been there. I’ve been good at it and I’ve been terrible at it.
But there comes a moment where you catch yourself watching an elite-level football match and keeping your eye on one player from each team, or clock-watching until a clean sheet point lands.
That’s the point where it has gone beyond fun game and is straying into “sending a tweet to the official Premier League Twitter account angrily asking why Leif Davis has not been credited with an assist”. And that’s not cool.
12) Enjoy a new kit or not, but never argue about it…
Life is a tapestry and preference is a spectrum. Some people only like heavy metal and some people only like arias.
You wouldn’t (OK, you shouldn’t) try to persuade someone for whom Iron Maiden are their all-timer band that Vivaldi is technically better, so don’t do the same for pinstripes vs wide hoops.
There’s enough to argue about with strangers on the internet that kit releases don’t have to make the list.
13) …and wait for the sponsor before making your call
Because my God we’ve all made the mistake of loving a design and then seeing “BanterBet” or “CryptoXL” plastered upon the front in the traditional colour of your fiercest rival’s home shirt.
14) Contract renewals are often better than new players
Transfers dominate discussion. I get it: everybody likes their club signing players and nobody likes their club selling key players, even when it’s part of a wider strategy.
But my biggest take (is it hot – who knows?) is that extending the contracts of players the manager views as key first-team contributors is of more value to the club, and its chances of success in the coming season, than signing new ones. Typically, these are individuals who have contributed most towards dressing room harmony and on-pitch success and are effectively the disciples of the manager.
You might not get a “Here We Go” for your first-choice right-back staying for three more years and looking delighted to be doing so, but it’s just as worth your celebration.
15) Missing out on a player isn’t a reason to panic
Your club will be interested in a whole series of players. They will have ideal signings and backups for each option.
Some of those targets will not get beyond a brief conversation and others will involve discussions with clubs, players and agents. You will not always get your top targets (OK, maybe you support Real Madrid). That does not mean that your club has no ambition or are considered chumps by players at other clubs.
People have preferences about clubs, managers, leagues, countries and regions. Things will work out OK. Probably.
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16) Make a plan for your season and hit the ground running
I’m ending with the good stuff. For all the noise surrounding men’s major tournament-less summers, the second half of July is the time when personal dreams are weaved.
Be it intending to attend every one of your team’s home games, ticking off new grounds on the road, planning that European long weekend that you and your mates have always planned or working out just how on earth you get back from Fleetwood Town on a Tuesday night when your partner needs the car, the time is now.
Money is tighter than ever, public transport is a mess and your team always lets you down when it matters but none of that seems to matter when the new football season sits in front of you in spreadsheet form and long lists of fixtures on a laptop screen. They smell of opportunity. This is Christmas Eve.
Opportunistic plug: I will be following my Doing The 92 project with something different in 2025-26, that allows me to tell the stories we think matter most in-person and in detail (but perhaps without making the logistics quite so tight for time). More on that very soon.
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