How I Became a Southampton FC Fan

I first became a Southampton FC fan some time in 2010.  This is how it happened.

When I grew up in the 1960s in Palo Alto, California, I played soccer occasionally, but there was no formal league or coaching.  I did not pay much attention to soccer for many years thereafter.  I attended the 1994 round of 16 World Cup soccer game between Brazil and the United States.  It was an enjoyable experience, but I have no clear memories of anything other than being there.

For reasons I cannot explain, I became very interested in the 2002 World Cup.  Even though I did not have a DVR at the time and, therefore, had to watch the games live, I stayed up until ridiculously late hours of the night or, more accurately, early hours of the morning and watched 54 and a half games.  Given that the third round group games are played simultaneously, it was mathematically impossible for me to watch more than 56 games so that was a pretty good record.  Obviously, I enjoyed the experience but, again, paid little attention to soccer until the 2006 World Cup where, this time with the assistance of a DVR, I watched 49 games.

I was so eager for the 2010 World Cup that in mid-May, on a whim, I decided to buy Football Manager 2010 from Steam.  Not knowing much about football (and yes, this is when I started referring to soccer as football) I created my first career save using the United States, Brazil, and England.  They seemed like the logical three nations to choose at the time.  I started playing as the manager of the San Jose Earthquakes and immediately discovered that Major League Soccer was incomprehensible.  You could not hire scouts.  There were things called designated players who were apparently both expensive and, hopefully, very good, but because there were no scouts, you would have no clear idea how good a player was before you signed him.  There was some kind of a player draft, but again, no ability to scout the players in advance.  Finally, there was something called allocation money which simply made no sense to me.  I gave up and started over.

I had saved the initial starting state before I picked a team to coach so I reloaded it and decided to play an English team.  I vaguely understood the concept of promotion and relegation and knew that it would be too complicated to run a premier league team so I decided that I would start two levels down in league 1.  I wanted a financially healthy team with a strong youth development system. Obviously, that meant that I picked Southampton.

What I didn’t know is that by using the game that I had created to play the Earthquakes, I was starting in January of 2009.  This meant that I was in charge of a team with no schedule.  While this might seem like a drawback, it was actually a handy way to learn the game.  After a few weeks without any games, I started scheduling my own friendlies.  I played a serious of friendly games against miscellaneous teams stretching from late January into May when, suddenly, all my players went on vacation.

One would think that somewhere along the line I would have done some research, figured out what I was doing wrong, and started over, but I didn’t.  Instead, I patiently worked my way through the transfer window, my players came back from vacation, and I started the regular season.  I won my first game and checked the standings and was stunned to discover that I had negative seven points.  This was, obviously, very confusing.

Inexplicably, I did not go to the Internet to figure out what was going on but continued playing.  (I’ll spare you the crackpot theories I came up with to explain the negative 10 points.) I did pretty well that first season, missing the playoffs by only a single point.  In subsequent seasons I worked the team up to the premier league and, eventually, Southampton became the best team in the world winning the BPL and the Champions League six seasons in a row. (If you think my ability to do this without knowing much of anything about football, suggests that, perhaps, the game was too easy, you are probably correct.)

One of the advantages of playing Southampton in Football Manager 2010 is that Markus Liebherr was happy to hand me unlimited amounts of money whenever the cash ran short.  As best I can estimate, by the time I was winning all the championships, he was gifting the team about a quarter of a billion dollars per year.  Even though I didn’t know anything about the real Markus Liebherr, I was shocked to hear of his death.  It bothered me enough that when Football Manager 2011 came out I couldn’t play Southampton and, instead, I played Middlesbrough which I also advanced to the premier league and multiple consecutive Champions League titles.

In subsequent editions of Football Manager I went back to playing Southampton with varying degrees of success, but I usually won the Champions League multiple times.  Only once did Nicola Cortese fire me.

Meanwhile, I started watching English football regularly in August 2010.  I tried to follow Southampton, but it is basically impossible to follow a League One team very closely from the United States. Had I discovered the League One Minus Ten blog  at that point it would have been helpful, but I only found it halfway through the 2011-2012 season.  Instead, I temporarily became a Tottenham fan because I had two friends who followed them.  By the time the 2010-2011 season was ended, I was routinely watching 4-8 BPL games per week while checking Southampton scores as they occurred.

Once we were promoted to the championship, it was a little easier to follow the team because the Fox Soccer mobile app usually had one or two championship games available every week and, because we were doing so well, a Southampton game was often one of those games.  As a result, I was able to watch about eight or nine Southampton games that year.

Once Southampton got promoted to the premier league, I was able to follow the team quite easily.  I watched 37 of the 38 league games our first season.  The only game I missed was the nil-nil away draw at Norwich which I had DVRed, but I accidentally heard the score of and decided that I could skip it. Last season I watched all 38 BPL games.  I have also watched  three FA cup games, but have never seen a league cup game.  I vaguely considered starting a blog about the team in August 2012, but did not do so because I wasn’t sure whether I had anything interesting to say about the team.  Also, I was busy.  I started this blog when I did because I believed that I could provide useful information about the potential effects of the financial fair play regulations on Southampton and because of my Moneyball approach to sports.

Why this sequence of events should have led me to becoming a fanatical fan of a new team in my 50s is hard to explain.  I have always been a fanatical fan of the San Francisco Giants Baseball team, the Stanford Cardinal college football team, and the San Francisco 49ers football team.  I was also very much a fan of the California Golden Seals ice hockey team in the early 1970s, but that team no longer exists.  However, my interest in all those sports has greatly decreased.

With respect to the Giants, I miss Barry Bonds.  Despite the fact that we apparently now know Bonds was using performance enhancing substances, his five peak years from 2000 through 2004 were quite simply amazing to watch.  When that streak ended, the scandal and the lowered level of excitement made baseball less interesting to me.  Of course, this was very bad timing since the Giants have won the World Series twice since then—of course, I watched them do it, but without the intimate familiarity with the team I had had for my entire life.

My interest in the San Francisco 49ers has not dropped quite that much.  I still watch every TV game in my area which is every game when they are playing well and most games when they are not.  However, my growing awareness of the severe level of brain damage American football is inflicting on its players made it harder for me to enjoy. Certainly, I could no longer be enthusiastic over hard hits.  It also did not help that after nearly 20 years of being pretty much the best team around, the 49ers became not very good for over a decade and only recently, became one of the best teams again.

In other words, I was a big sports fan who had, for various reasons, lost significant interest in my prior sports obsessions.  As a result, I had an opening for a new obsession and purely by the happenstance the team I picked was Southampton.  This may not be as good a reason as growing up near The Dells, but it works for me.