Observations of a Football Fan at Wimbledon

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

I have lived in London for more than a decade. I support one of its football clubs (no, I'm not telling you which) and have visited every stadium in the Premier League. I've also been to almost every football league ground and a smattering of non-league stadia, from Witham Town in the north to Dulwich Hamlet's Champion Hill in the south.

But until last week I had never been to Wimbledon. At least not to watch tennis. I saw AFC Wimbledon lose 3-0 at home to Rochdale a few seasons back, amidst sideways February rain that made me wish they'd never risen from the ashes in the first place, but the Dons don't even play in Wimbledon.

So it was time to pop my tennis cherry (or perhaps strawberry, if that works). On the hottest day of the year so far I set off for SW19 to watch a bit of tennis and see how the other half live.

As a bit of a football tourist, I've found myself on packed trains heading towards a dozen or so grounds, clinging onto an overhead rail and half-attempting to sing along with supporters' songs. I kind of like it, but at the same time the ubiquitous group of 37-year-old adolescents drinking tins of Fosters and being quietly obnoxious about women fucks me off.

But when you're an actual fan of the club the journey is part of the experience. The same train with the same mates, getting off for a drink at the same pub, walking up the road to watch the same team let you down again. And again and again and again.

The tennis journey experience is quite different. Rolling along the District Line to Southfields station in the afternoon heat, my carriage is largely empty. The few voices I hear are American: a family of four dressed in creepily similar combos of shorts, bumbag, t-shirt and hat. The children look disinterested, the parents stare at the tube map on the carriage wall as if it were ancient hieroglyphics they are unable to decipher. Elsewhere a shrill voice (also American) is asking why Wimbledon is not in Wimbledon, to which her partner replies "It's all horseshit." Quite.

The queue at Wimbledon is a thing in itself. I think some people may just go there for this — British people, obviously, not the Americans, who now look kind of fed up and bemused at being stood in a large field. The size of a few football pitches, it's scattered with the odd food van, all of which look empty. The place has the feel of an abandoned fairground from an episode of Scooby-Doo.

The queue is such a big deal that there's a handbook distributed while you stand there which refers to 'The Queue' as if it's a living, breathing thing. It's all very orderly. You sit down and make polite conversation: a Japanese lady tells me this is here seventh time at Wimbledon, then confuses matters horribly by holding up eight fingers. The security staff manning the queue all seem to be women in their 50s and 60s who look and sound like Penelope Keith. Have you ever seen six Penelope Keiths patrolling an abandoned fairground? I basically have.

The experience is weirdly sedate and — now I recall it — pleasant. It's nothing like a football queue. No pushing, no swearing, no stench of sweat and booze. But at the same time, you kind of miss the self-deprecating shouts and drunken camaraderie. It's an evening at home with a bottle of wine vs. a night in a scuzzy pub.

Huge points to Wimbledon for this one. Game, set and match. An ace. Assorted other tennis clichés.

At football games, alcohol not purchased on-site is treated with the same severity as an open bag of anthrax at the primary school sports day. Is it any wonder football fans load up on drinks in the pubs around the ground?

At Wimbledon, things are done very differently. You can drink (responsibly) in the queue. Wine and beer are the most common tipples — you're not likely to be shotting vodka. And because people have a modicum of responsibly, people are responsible. Yeah, if you treat people like adults they tend to behave like them. At football humans are treated as animals, so is it any wonder that they sometimes (but, let's be honest, not very often) behave like them?

But here's where it gets almost surreal: at Wimbledon, you can take a small (but not insignificant) amount of booze in with you. No, I'm 100% serious about this. Two 500ml cans of lager in your cool bag, sir? In you go, my good man, and enjoy them responsibly.

Two 500ml cans of a very decent brand of lager, purchased from a local cornershop for the very reasonable sum of £2.60. In a football ground, roughly the same amount of a lesser standard beer would set you back by about a tenner. And it'd be warm, kind of flat, and served in a plastic cup that means you slosh about half of it on to the floor as you attempt to escape the 12-deep queue at the bar. I am not lying when I say that getting those two beers in was the highlight of my day.

Let's get to some actual tennis, shall we? In the ground, bathed in sun and one can of uniquely glorious-tasting beer down, I take in a game.

The first thing that strikes me are the ballboys and girls at Wimbledon; the little fuckers unsettled me greatly. You see them on TV, looking like a year 11 bully's dream in their purple outfits and Just Williams hats. But it can't prepare you for how mechanical they really are. I mean, these kids make Djokovic seem resplendent with humanity.

It's in stark contrast to football. Ballboys (and less commonly girls) can be insolent little shits, but they're part of the theatre. They shield the ball from opposition players, and then hurl it hard at them. Remember when Eden Hazard kicked that Swansea ballboy? That was fucking great!

It's a very different story at Wimbledon. Their ballboys and girls are like custom-built robots from a dystopian future in which everyone wears purple. Their limbs could easily be operated by remote control from a gantry above the court. Arms snap into position and dispense balls at the players with mechanical rigidity. Put simply, they're not human. And if there's one thing sport should always been, above all else, it is human.

There's a weird tendency at Wimbledon to support the big name over the underdog. Like, "yeah, fuck you David, give us a win for mighty Goliath any day." Case in point: I sit and watch the American Bethanie Mattek-Sands, who is ranked number 158 in the world, take on Ana Ivanovic, the current number six. It would be difficult to put that into football terms — it's not apples and apples — but it's fair to say that this is roughly the equivalent of a Premier League side playing a club from the lower divisions in the FA Cup.

Mattek-Sands was dominant. She was breaking serve and playing with energy. She was demonstrably hungrier than Ivanovic, who looked pretty disinterested in the match. Mattek-Sands is a relative veteran who's never achieved a great deal in the Slams. Good for her, I thought.

And yet the majority of support seemed to be for Ivanovic, presumably because she's the name they recognised. She has played in the Wimbledon semi-finals and is a former French Open winner; Mattek-Sands has never been beyond the fourth round at a Slam, and this was only her second time past the first round at Wimbledon. She was the underdog. The natural inclination should be to root for her. I've noticed similar stuff on TV too. I like Rafa Nadal, but when Dustin Brown started showing him the way I was cheering for the dreadlocked underdog. Because that is a story.

When League 1 side Bradford beat Chelsea in the FA Cup last season, pretty much every one who doesn't call themselves a Chelsea fan was cheering the Bantams on. Tennis has this one very wrong.

To state the blatantly obvious, they're different things, but they could probably learn something from each other.

I'm not suggesting football stadia would ever let you bring a few drinks in, but there is certainly the potential to treat fans with a bit more humanity and seeing how that affects their behaviour. And you don't need Wimbledon to tell you this is a possibility — it's blatantly fucking obvious, lads.

Wimbledon fans could be a bit more open-minded when it comes to supporting underdogs. Sport is about stories — gnarled journeymen getting their moment of glory by beating a champion — not the relentless march of established names to the top of a pyramid built from the corpses of their vanquished opponents. Although that is basically Novak Djokovic in a sentence.

Wimbledon also lacks a bit of humanity. That is probably because the punters there are pretty much one type of person: white, middle-class, English. The Americans on the Tube were a false sign: most of the people at Wimbledon seem to have flooded in from the Shires, Surrey, and other places where your ex-girlfriend's gran lives.

But I'd happily go back to Wimbledon. It's kind of a laugh, despite its middle-England vibe. No one at Wimbledon (beyond perhaps a few hardcores) really cares that much. They're out for a bit of fun in the sun before forgetting the whole thing again for another year.

Football, in stark contrast, can be depressingly serious and bitter. Grown men turn red in the face, screaming obscenities at opposition players while their 10-year-old kid stands at their side. Football fans care too much. For a day at least, it felt good to simply not give a shit. A couple of cans of cheap beer merely added a warm fuzz.