Emotion sick

Till I Die Why football means everything by Damien Pearse

Oneworld, £18.99

It’s a moment that hasn’t lost its power to shock. Watching it back now, Paul Mitchell’s vault-and-run invasion of the pitch at St Andrew’s in 2019 – pursued by a steward who doesn’t stand a chance – happens in slow motion. Knowing what comes next, you hope that someone will haul him down before he gets to Jack Grealish. But no: the punch lands, sending Grealish to the floor. Mitchell is also sent tumbling and, barely visible among a crowd of furious players, the Birmingham City fan is dragged away, towards a jail sentence and a life permanently altered.

Quite what might drive a football supporter to such a spectacular act of self-destruction is the subject of Damien Pearse’s Till I Die, an engrossing, research-heavy investigation into what exactly it is about the sport that provokes rage, intense jealousy, and wild mood swings. For those of us who don’t recognise ourselves in the fans featured, it’s certainly a rollercoaster.

A psychologist by trade, Pearse is well placed to unpick how otherwise rational people can be affected so deeply, and while Mitchell is a recurring presence throughout, the author himself features heavily. “Why does football affect my mood so badly?” is the title of one chapter, and Pearse assembles an impressive array of experts to try to explain it, from forensic scientists more used to dealing with murderers, to Harvard professors who have dedicated their careers to studying the “neurobiology of schadenfreude”.

Some of the theories are more questionable than others. Certainly, I wasn’t expecting to read about shrinking gonads and the bright white scrotums of vervet monkeys in the context of a Wolves defeat (Pearse is a Wanderers fan), but this is nonetheless fascinating stuff. An entertaining exploration of tribalism and “identity fusion” with Dr Martha Newson is followed by a poignant trip to a “reminiscence session” at the Amex, where Brighton & Hove Albion alumni use the feelings we attach to matchday memories as a weapon in the battle against dementia.

This is also a book about redemption – or, at least, attempts at it. Pearse meets Alfie Perkins, who mocked Grealish’s dead brother on social media, and Dale Houghton, who was forced into hiding after taunting Sunderland fans with a photo of Bradley Lowery, a young supporter who died of a rare form of cancer. Instead of cartoon villains, Pearse finds himself talking to the humans we don’t see behind the angry tweets and boorish banter culture.

Still, at times, it can all start to feel a bit much. Later, there are suicides apparently caused by a single bad result watched on a screen thousands of miles away in Kenya, and the relationship between football and domestic violence makes for uncomfortable, if necessary, reading.

Till I Die is an ambitious book, and while you might find yourself baffled by how some people can vanish so completely into football’s psychological quicksand, you will finish it with a clearer, if unsettling, understanding of why the game holds such a powerful grip on the emotions of so many supporters. Pete Brooksbank