Club v Country? It’s a debate that we’ll return to again and again, but as far as football fans are concerned there’s only one winner – and it’s not the Three Lions! In the Football Fans Survey 2011 conducted right here on FootballFanCast.com you voted overwhelmingly in favour of your Premier League and Football League clubs over England and the rest of the home nations, with domestic football clearly taking precedence over internationals. Has this been influenced by England’s dreadful performances on the international stage in recent years, or is it purely down to the fact that we follow our clubs year-in-year-out and only support our country every other summer?
I’m pretty certain that England’s performance in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa has had an influence on the results of our survey. Headlines such as the one in The Sun which said ‘you let your country down’ were largely representative of the thoughts of the nation. We struggled through the group stages and then were thumped by Germany, not exactly a great tournament. This can only have contributed to the nation’s feeling of malaise towards the national side, which isn’t helped by a string of international friendlies that only serve to disrupt the exciting Premier League season.
The first question we asked in our survey was whether you’d prefer your club to win their league or England to win Euro 2012. While the latter is never going to happen due to Fabio Capello’s men continually putting in poor performances (and as a Newcastle fan I’m not going to see my club win their league any time soon either), a huge majority of people would prefer to see their club succeed over their country. More than four fifths of people voted this way and although victory in an international competition would be good for the country, it appears club silverware would mean so much more.
The second question we asked concerned sacrificing the quality of the Premier League for a better national team. Again over three quarters of people wouldn’t be prepared to do that, which to some extent shows how little we care about our country’s football exploits. However, the Premier League is the greatest football league in the world and something no-one wants to damage. There are arguments that by capping the amount of foreigners in the league or introducing a winter break we’d see England perform better at major tournaments, but then the Premier League would suffer as a result.
I ask the question, is our support for the national team waning? When England won the World Cup in 1966 the whole country was watching. If that unlikely event happened again, I’m sure it would generate great interest right across England, but then our attention would quickly turn to the Premier League once more. The fact is many of us spend hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds every season to watch our club team week-in-week-out and we just don’t have the same amount of emotion invested in our national team. Club v Country? Football fans have spoken and club wins almost every time!
To see the rest of the results from the Football Fans Survey 2011, brought to you by ZOO Magazine and FootballFanCast.com, click here
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