The people's game has become the acid test of political virtue, the passport to a cabinet post, the seal of street cred. The new football fan profiled

On every Saturday morning of the football season, new and expensive cars speed up and down the motorways of England, scarves trailing from their windows and flapping wildly in the slipstream. Quite often the cars are festooned with other signs of loyalty to a football club: flags and bunting fly from aerials, slogans adorn the rear window, even the bodywork is sometimes smeared with the colours of the glorious team. If football were my passion, I think I should indulge in it as a secret vice, as a childish thing I had not yet been able to put away. But nowadays the middle-class football fan wears his enthusiasm quite openly, as a badge of virtue, not only shamelessly but proudly. Indeed, he is apt to interpret a lack of interest in the game as a vice, or at least as an affectation.

How could anyone not care about the fate of Arsenal or Everton? To be indifferent to football is to be a snob, and to be a snob is to be an enemy of the people.

The mere excitement or aesthetic properties of the game cannot explain the growth of enthusiasm for it among the middle class. After all, the English simply aren't very good at it. By all accounts, English players lack the dedication and self-control that their Continental colleagues have and take for granted. While we are surprised if a Continental player cannot speak English, we are surprised if an English player can.

The middle-class fan who tries to explain to an unbeliever why he goes to the trouble and expense of traipsing up and down the country after his team is likely to allude to past intellectuals who have expressed their love of the game. He may not actually have read Language, Truth and Logic, but there can hardly be an educated football fan in the country who does not know that A J Ayer seldom missed a match at White Hart Lane, home of Tottenham Hotspur. Never mind that some people now suggest that Ayer wasn't a very good philosopher; some of his intellectual allure is bound to rub off on those who follow in his footsteps. The argument goes that if a philosopher likes football, then liking football makes you a philosopher: a strange use to which the name of a professor of logic should be put.

As the middle-class football fan knows, there is more to the sport than kicking a ball around, and more at stake than promotion or relegation in the league. This much is obvious from the speech that our dear leader made to the party conference recently, in which, amid his outline of our glorious future under his direction, he found time to express his anxieties over the future of Newcastle United. This established him as one of the lads, who shout obscenities from what used to be the terraces, but are now the £50 seats.

This is not the only indication that football is the acid test of political virtue and loyalty: the question is, are you now, or have you ever been, a football fan? If the answer is no, a cabinet post is not open to you: for how otherwise are you to fill in the section in Who's Who devoted to interests and hobbies? Literature, perhaps, or fine arts? Heaven forbid: that is the kiss of political death.

The middle-class football fan is thus making a political statement as well as spending a great deal of time and money on the sport. And even before he ever started to attend, he knew at least three things about football: first that it was a proletarian game, second that proletarians were downtrodden and oppressed and therefore not only virtuous but (on the grounds that the last shall be first) bound in the end to inherit the earth. Finally, he knew that proletarians were coarse, vulgar and abusive in their language and conduct.

So, in attending football matches, even when he sits in the best seats, the middle-class fan becomes an honorary proletarian, in more or less the same way that Marie Antoinette once became an honorary shepherdess. And as the transition from Thatcher to Blair has amply demonstrated, there is no better way to advance your career than to take part in the wave of the future. When cabinet ministers relax, the talk is all of City or United. "How alarming," said one man who had attended such an occasion, "that those who run our country are besotted with such crap."

But it is in his actual conduct in the stadium that the middle-class fan demonstrates his new allegiance most clearly. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then obscenity is the tribute that the middle class pays to the proletariat - even if it is only the proletariat of its overheated imagination.

The middle-class football fan, casually but expensively dressed, with a good job in computing or accountancy, say, and a BMW waiting for him outside in a nearby car park (guarded, of course, by a real proletarian against the expected depredations of other real proletarians), spends close to three hours shouting vile obscenities at people he does not know and will never meet. Not only this, but he actually feels virtuous for having done so, for it brought him into close, almost mystical union with the people. This, for him, is the breath of real life, not his etiolated existence in his modern office with water coolers and the latest technology.

The middle-class fan absolves himself of the crime of being prosperous by immersing himself in a huge crowd of others and behaving exactly like them. By supporting the team, he at last has an identity of interest with many people who are poorer than he, and so social and economic distinctions are washed away in the balm of enthusiasm. He makes the same obscene and quasi-fascistic gestures as everyone else, he raises his voice with 10,000 others and makes no objection to whatever is being shouted. He is angry at the referee at exactly the same moment as everyone around him, he bares his teeth in the same snarl, and expresses precisely the same hatreds and the same joys as everyone around him. His goal is to dissolve his own personality in the collective personality of the crowd, to be released for a few hours from the necessity to think or to stand out from others and be original.

If asked why he behaves in what civilised people should consider a vile, degraded and frighteningly mindless manner, the middle-class fan will say that it is a release. But a release from what, exactly? The middle-class fan is a believer in the hydraulic model of human emotion: if his frustration with work or a dyslexic child is not released in a comparatively innocent way in a football stadium, it will be released in some other less harmless manner.

The middle-class fan lives in the suburbs, where urban life entails no contact with anyone other than his immediate family. There is no conviviality, no social interaction, no interest in others, no communal activity. The design of the suburbs precludes it, besides which the middle-class fan is too tired after work to do anything other than nothing. The football crowd offers him a feeling of tribal belonging, but also the warm glow of community spirit. His life is for a moment no longer atomic, but molecular - the crowd being a vast polymer. That is why he is willing to struggle through abominable traffic (such as he encounters on the way to work) to reach the ground.

To ensure that the bonding takes place, without which the whole lengthy process of attending the match would be pointless, the middle-class fan adapts his language to the crowd the moment he enters its orbit. All traces of received pronunciation are ruthlessly expunged from his diction. He suddenly finds himself unable to express even the simplest of thoughts without the help of expletives. And he has no shame about using them in front of women or children, such as was the case only a few short decades ago.

The middle-class female fan (of whom there are increasing numbers) has a double transformation to undergo: first she must turn herself into what she imagines a proletarian to be, that is to say a person of the coarsest sentiment and the most uninhibited vulgarity; and second into a man, that is to say a person of the coarsest sentiment and the most uninhibited vulgarity. She thus imposes upon herself a double dose of unattractiveness. And because the interest is of comparatively recent origin in her, she mugs up on the recent history of the game and is anxious to show off her knowledge of it. Not surprisingly, this turns her into a frightful bore.

So desperate is the middle-class fan to achieve mystical union with others, to abandon responsibility for his own acts by joining in with thousands of strangers, and to evade the discipline of self-restraint, that he invariably refers to the team as "we". In part, this is an adolescent fantasy of joining the lads on the pitch and of scoring the dramatic last-minute goal, to the joyous approbation of millions. But it is also indicative of a need to belong to something larger than himself, to a collective larger than his family. By using the first person plural, he is taking the easy, populist route to identity of interest with others.

One of the arguments against fox-hunting is that it must have a bad effect on the character of those who do it. It turns people who are normally without vicious instincts into bloodthirsty savages: and such a transformation - so the argument goes - must eventually leave permanent traces on the character. What, then, are we to say of the effect of football on the character of those who watch it, at least in current social and cultural conditions? No doubt it is possible to watch a game of football, and even be excited by it, without becoming a degenerate, swearing vulgarian: it isn't so long ago, after all, that we in Britain laughed at the antics of the Italian and South American football crowds that had to be restrained by wire fences, Alsatian dogs, tear gas and so forth.

To preserve the good name of the middle classes, therefore, and for the good of the character of the middle-class fan himself, no one paying higher-rate income tax should be allowed entry to a football stadium. Then the working class would no longer have to ape the middle class aping the working class.

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