Like so many people, the greatest day of my life was 26 May 1999, when Manchester United beat Bayern Munich with two goals in injury time and won the European Champions League for the second time in their history.

I was sixteen at the time and we were midway through the summer term at my boarding school in Northamptonshire. I might have been the only kid from Manchester in the whole place, even if home was a posh suburb rather than anything close to the Gallaghers. At any rate, United were known to be my team, not least because there weren’t all that many serious football fans – I could still tell you who supported Newcastle or Stoke or Derby. Everyone would watch Match of the Day for something to do on a Saturday night, but football was generally regarded as plebeian and those who liked it too much were derided as ‘Kevins’. That seemed to be the view of the institution too: I remember campaigning for us to be allowed to play football instead of hockey as our sport during the term that came between rugby and cricket. There were already a few alternatives like squash or swimming or badminton, but those apparently posed no threat to the school’s identity and ethos.

I was the kind of smart-aleck scholarship boy who took pleasure in flouting the prevailing culture of Barbour-jacketed rugger-buggery, but I was also the kind of geek for whom any sport can quickly become an irresistible rabbit hole. I used to love picturing myself as the manager, filling notebooks with sketches of different formations and lists of players to buy and sell. In the break between morning classes I would slip into the newsagents and brave the owner’s disapproving gaze to scour the tabloids for transfer gossip before emerging at the till with a packet of crisps. Every so often I did actually buy a magazine. Sometimes it was FourFourTwo, where you could read about up-and-coming players from around the world as well as tactical developments, such as the German sweeper system or the Italian catenaccio defence, but most often I landed on United’s official club magazine, which contained must-read columns by ex-players George Best and Brian McClair as well as vital information about youth prospects. One day I tried my luck and wrote a letter to the United manager recommending an under-18 player called Gareth Fulton from Portadown in Northern Ireland who I’d seen tipped for the top in one of the magazines, and when I didn’t hear anything back I wrote again to make sure the message had been received. (Googling him now, it looks like Fulton lasted one or two seasons in professional football before pursuing a Masters in Anthropology at Maynooth University.)

We had classes on Saturday mornings, there being no other way to occupy kids at boarding school, and I remember one early kick-off between United and Arsenal that coincided with a double English lesson. I did everything the teacher required of me in terms of reading aloud, making notes, answering questions and so forth, all while furtively listening to the radio broadcast, my head tilted to one side and resting against fingers that concealed a single earphone whose wire led through the sleeve of my navy blazer, down my chest and back into the Walkman resting in my trouser pocket. I had agreed to pass reports to an Arsenal-supporting friend but when Marc Overmars scored them a late winner I instead announced that my battery had run out. It seemed easier than accepting the humiliation head on, except that when my friend saw the score later he guessed what I had done and confronted me. At that point the only option was to double down, conceding nothing, which I did for something like the next twenty years.

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These days my relationship to football is hard to separate from my other forms of internet addiction. Living in America I watch most games on the computer, either alone in my office if it’s a weeknight fixture (given the time difference) or with a child climbing over me at the weekend. But the matches themselves are just the tip of the iceberg, since much of my personal time – the time I have to myself, I mean, once work and home and sleep have been subtracted – is devoted to thinking about United. It fluctuates, but at its worst I’ll be awake in the night, rerunning games in my head, picking the team for the weekend or plotting future transfers. At a minimum I’ll read the BBC, the Times, the Guardian and the Athletic before I go to bed, as soon as I wake up and when I’m sitting on the toilet. I’m a college professor now so my days are fairly unstructured and the only consistent accountability mechanism is guilt. After a sustained period of concentration I’ll generally reward myself by scanning online forums like Reddit and RedCafe where similarly solitary fans debrief after games or argue over tweets and transfers; but more often I take the reward in advance of the work that’s meant to justify it. From the point of view of the Manchester United business corporation, registered in the Cayman Islands and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, I must surely count as a hyper-engaged fan. But following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would. The reason, of course, is that we’re terrible.

My wife says I should just switch to Man City. I know she’s taking the piss, but why exactly is the idea so insane? If you watch football for pleasure, and your pleasure is greater when your team wins, it seems like you should support the team that’s likeliest to win. Young kids do tend to follow that reasoning, sometimes even shifting allegiance within the same match. Once you get to a certain age, though, pleasure and pain become a function of attachment rather than the other way around. Although I am indeed happier when my team wins, it does have to be my team. And any pleasure I take is more closely related to a release of anger than anything that could be described as fun.

Even if changing your allegiance is unthinkable, what my wife is really getting at, I think, is that no one forces you to actively follow your team, and that you should bear that in mind when you catch yourself being tetchy or mopey in the presence of young kids after a game. I clearly know this myself insofar as I happily tune into and out of English cricket depending on who they’re playing and whether I have time, and I almost never check up on my first sporting love, Lancashire County Cricket Club, whose players’ signatures I once displayed proudly on my bedroom wall.

In my case, I think it’s fair to describe what happened to me as a teenager with United as falling in love: I was besotted and infatuated to the point where I was utterly incapable of impartiality, and my current relationship to the team reflects that. Following United during the last decade has been a grim experience, and there are many ways in which the club has lost the soul that men like Busby, Charlton and Ferguson gave it. But every so often there still arrives a moment, usually as we’re pushing for a goal and the opposition defenders’ clearances begin to land at our midfielders’ feet, when the crowd begins to throb again and at that moment I can feel the oxygen tickling the embers and the flame flickering back to life and suddenly amid the ashes I catch a glimpse of my old team and my old self shining forth: ‘U-N-I-T-E-D, United are the team for me, with a knick-knack paddywhack, give a dog a bone, why don’t City fuck off home?’

Image© Shelby Murphy Figueroa