EXACTLY.
As a global soccer fan that loves to watch good football from any nation, Ive taken a liking to Real Madrid, Sanfreece Hiroshima in the J-League, and I enjoy watch derby games in the A-League. I have received nothing but support from fans of those teams and leagues...yet Ive encountered a lot of bad attitudes from British football fans when a yank dares support a club that isnt local to them (especially if an American supports a team rival to theirs).
They cannot seem to understand that the reason many foreigners support European clubs, is that in some nations, soccer is very young as a sport. And also, many people may not have had local football that was to their liking. In my case I never took much liking to RBNY...but now that we have NYC FC, they are firmly my number one club. And yes, even more dear to my heart than Real Madrid....and Im a huge Ramos and Ronaldo fan.
But I do not need to be from an area to be able to support that club. If certain people have a problem with that, then they should petition their club to stop their global marketing and drop down to the Championship or League One. Im sure they wont get any global fans down at that level.
Funny thing about all this, is Ive never come across an American bash a Brit for liking the Yankees or the Cowboys. And Ive come across quite a few Brits that like baseball and American football a bit. If anything Americans are very VERY open to people loving our sports, regardless of team affiliation.
PS - Ive never met anyone from the Bronx baffled that Yankee fans are all over the world. They seem to understand that the Yankees have an amazing history of accomplishments. I usually hear a lot of gloating that the Yanks have so many fans, rather than fans upset with foreign fans.
Just for the once I'm going to break ranks and act as apologist for this, because understanding other peoples' mindsets is important to me (as I hope people might appreciate from the way I post in that Bluemoon thread).
The thing is, it's the culture - it's how people are programmed to think. In the UK, we are brought up to believe that you follow your dad's football team or your local team - and preferably they are both the same club. If that team is the club who just won the league last year - congratulations, you just won the lottery. If that club is some two-bit village side competing in the fourteenth tier of the pyramid, averaging 20 fans a game then that's just the way it goes, so get used to it. Changing your allegiance is not an option - it's virtually heresy, and not only will the fans of the team you used to support reject you as a traitor, but the fans of your new club will not accept you either. It also doesn't help that we don't really have new clubs here - the ones founded recently are virtually all just old clubs reforming under a new name. People can't really understand where new clubs get fans from.
The reason British fans often take badly to foreign fans is not because we don't like foreign people supporting our teams but because we have been hard-wired from a young age to accept that these are the only two ways people become fans. Obviously some take it better than others (I'd say probably the older the fan, the less they are willing to accept it) but this rise of a new third way of supporting a club - finding a team you have no link with but choosing to form a bond on your own merits - doesn't make sense to many people here, because it's simply not how we learned it. It's not too dissimilar to how we can't comprehend the gun culture in the US - we grew up with no guns, so many people just don't understand why anyone would want one.
What makes it so contentious is that, shortly before the rush of foreign fans supporting PL sides (or rather, at the same time but much more visibly early on) was the "glory hunter" fans in the UK who had no reason not to support their local/dad's team, but started following a club solely because it was winning trophies. This was particularly an issue in schools where playground politics and juvenile emotions made things seem worse than they really were, but at the same time cemented a bias in a huge number of peoples' minds against people jumping on bandwagons. Successful clubs were hated clubs, and because the successful clubs got the bandwagoners, the bandwagoners became hated.
Now a lot of foreign football fans are picking up PL clubs, a lot of people simply can't distinguish the difference between this situation and the problem of that unpopular kid at school who supported Manchester United because he wanted to see them win, even though he lived in London.
For the record - it is becoming far more acceptable as people simply have to adapt to the fact that this is the way the world is, and attitudes are changing. I don't want to give the impression that you're always going to be treated with hostility if you follow a British team, because for the most part you will be accepted. However, threads like this where hostility is already simmering are catalysts for bringing issues like this to the surface, hence why so long as there are frosty relations between the two CFG clubs, this argument is always going to keep resurfacing.
