The European football championships reminds us again of the grip that football has over England. In the search for that elusive phenomenon - the unifying national experience - only the death of a major royal seems to rival an international football tournament.
But now that everybody claims to be interested in football, a tedious form of one-upmanship has evolved. The goal is to prove that you are a "true fan" - not one of these middle-class johnny-come-latelies, who only began taking an interest after Gazza and Nick Hornby.
The cult of the true fan has certain informal rules. It is crucial that you have always supported one club. Ideally you will have begun supporting them "as a kid," when your dad first took you along. You started going in the 1970s or earlier - when football was all Bovril and bovver boots, rather than Posh and Becks. They are the local side and you have followed them through thick and thin. Indeed the thinner the better - your continued devotion to a useless team only shows what a true fan you are. An archetypal true fan is Alastair Campbell with his well-publicised devotion to Burnley - now in division Z. The despised antithesis of the true fan is a Manchester United supporter, living in London, who only began supporting the team a couple of years ago.
The cult of the true fan has launched a thousand newspaper articles. A recent example in the Guardian, from a writer called Charles Burgess, lamented the relegation of Carlisle United: "There never was any choice. My dad... took me down to Brunton Park to watch the derby match against Workington Town just after Christmas 41 years ago - I was hooked and have been ever since... My support has been about who we are and where we are from." All very admirable, but the actual football is almost incidental to this epic tale of suffering and father-son relationships.
Do I sound bitter? Perhaps I am. For I am a fairweather fan - an allegiance-switcher - despised by true fans everywhere. As it happens, I have many of the credentials to claim true fan status. In true Nick Hornby fashion, I first started going to football as a bonding exercise with a recently-divorced father. We had season tickets for Chelsea in the early and mid-1970s. I have been going to Chelsea on and off for over 30 years.
But for the true fan that phrase - "on and off" - condemns me out of my own laptop. For the truth is that I have been promiscuous in my affections. Around the mid-1970s, I began to go off Chelsea and to support QPR instead. Then from the mid-1980s I half-supported Spurs for about a decade. Now that Spurs are in decline and Chelsea are up - I'm back at Stamford Bridge. My old friends are sarcastic about this. Even my wife says that she finds the ease with which I switch affiliations faintly sinister.
But I'm not apologising. I stopped supporting Chelsea because they were a terrible team, followed by violent cretins. For what seemed like decades I would go back to Chelsea a couple of times a season to watch the no-hopers. I've forgotten many of their names, but for me they were all summed up in the person of John Bumstead - a hard-working but pedestrian midfield player. Down the road, QPR had Stan Bowles and on the other side of the city, Spurs had Glenn Hoddle and then Gazza.
To the true fan, of course, all of this is consumerist heresy. My response is that I'm the real football fan - because I'm actually interested in watching good football. The "true fans," on the other hand, are cultists worshipping a particular piece of ground or a shirt.
It's not that I am incapable of understanding the concept of undying loyalty to a team. I could not imagine giving up supporting England simply because Thierry Henry had a better season than Michael Owen. In fact in following England, I get glimmerings of the perverse pleasures of following a team who never quite get it right, but tantalise you with the possibility that they may one day. Such feelings do lead to odd behaviour. For example, I once took a boat from Singapore to Indonesia, in order to be able to get up at 3am to watch England play a World Cup qualifier in Poland. (A 1-1 draw, with Ian Wright getting a late equaliser.)
That last sentence incidentally was a typical example of true-fan one-upmanship: boasting masquerading as a self-deprecating confession. Extreme devotion to the England team is not an admirable trait. Still, it is at least more rational than extreme devotion to a club side. "Land of my birth" is an understandable idea - but why devote a huge amount of emotion to favouring one part of west London over another?
My approach is both more rational and more honest than the maunderings of true fans. But as Chelsea start to pull in new fans from all over the world, I can begin to feel myself becoming all true-fanish. I recently read an interview with Jeremy Vine of the BBC, who was described as a devoted Chelsea fan. Yet Vine admitted that he had not even been to Stamford Bridge until the mid-1990s. As I read this, a strange wave of indignation came over me and I heard myself saying "tosser" out loud. I am a true Chelsea fan. And I will remain so, until the moment when Abramovich is banged up, the millions disappear and Chelsea slide into liquidation or the second division. At that point I'll be off down the road, to QPR or Spurs.
