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Devil Worship
Kevin Leyland
World Audience, Inc.
ISBN: 9781935444824
Reviewed by Sean O'Conor
Devil Worship, a Manchester United devotional by Kevin Leyland, is perhaps a Fever Pitch for the internet fan generation. Unlike Nick Hornby, he has no family or local connection to his team and he does not actually go to their games: He lives in Georgia, USA, so his obsession exists courtesy of the internet or satellites orbiting the earth. United is not in his blood as much as in his iPhone.
In shameless glory-hunter style, Kevin picked his team after watching the Champions League on ESPN a few years ago. There was no choice really - it had to be the richest, most successful, best-supported high-profile team to cheer for, a glamourous global brand to buy into. He quickly becomes infatuated with the Red Devils and before long is calling himself "a die-hard" and Alex Ferguson, predictably "a genius" - I wonder if he has heard of Mark Robins. Leyland is clearly obsessed with his TV heroes, who cause him all manner of convulsions as he follows their 2008-'09 season on the box, replica shirt and all. As far as I could tell he has only ever been to two Man U games in person, but even that need not condemn the book.
He comes across as a likeable guy and describes the match action vividly, having worked as an online summarist. It might not be football supporting as is conventionally understood, but he is still a fan-atic. Yet unless we are Man Utd lovers we probably don't want to read one match report after another of a previous season because that information has been widely disseminated already. And we have been bombarded with the 'Glory, glory...' propaganda for the last 15 years, thanks very much. The emotional reactions of one spectator to the on-field events need a special slant to make them interesting. What Leyland should have done is tell us more about himself and why he feels a need to engross himself in every minute of a club's games on TV.
The most interesting parts of the book are when he moves away from the round-ups to record occasions when his life outside the sports bar or living room clashed emotionally with his fandom, but these passages end abruptly just as they had begun to engage: One is a transcendental moment when he has tickets to fly to Manchester but the coach who had given him the soccer bug dies and he knows he will miss the funeral if he goes to the match; another when he feels pangs of guilt because the traditional piss-up weekend of the Georgia v Alabama college football clashes with Hull's visit to Old Trafford, which of course he cannot miss out on either.
It was precisely such subtexts of human frailty and charming eccentricity which made Fever Pitch, or Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes (about American Football) classics, and which this book painfully lacks, as there is only so much mileage in recounting shouting at the televison every weekend.
As David Winner noted in a Around The World In 90 Minutes, a new type of fan has certainly been born in the digital age - one who watches every game of a team via cable and satellite but otherwise has no connection to it. Leyland's tales of scampering to find bars showing Setanta or desperately charging his iPlayer in his car so he can watch the Red Devils are not uncommon across the globe now. Since United's results clearly affect him emotionally and he endeavours never to miss a game on TV he may well be qualified to call himself a true fan. But equally you can ask why he hasn't bitten the bullet and moved to England to buy a season-ticket. A book about dodging the authorities for the sake of football could be rollicking.
Maybe I am cursed by my formative memories of terraces to misunderstand these folk, but there are overseas fans who emigrate to follow their favourite teams, including an American guy at Fulham. Try as I might, I cannot relate to someone who believes England reveres Monday night sport like America, who thinks a game watched from an executive box and the sponsors' lounge constitutes a live match experience and who makes the brazen statement that Liverpool v Man United is the game's biggest rivalry, a claim that would kick-start defibrilators from Glasgow to Buenos Aires.
Leyland's Man U are effectively a digital mirage of international superstars forged by Sky TV. The club's origins and the legacy of Munich are not on the author's radar and he breathtakingly never even mentions Malcolm Glazer, FC United or the whole monster of the club's ownership issue. As long as United are there for him on the Fox Soccer Channel, nothing else about the club or the rest of the sport seems to matter and he must be wondering why there are green and yellow scarves at Old Trafford this season. Indeed, the author even claims Arsenal are, "the epitome of everything wrong with soccer and the antithesis of everything Manchester United football club so ardently represents" - come again?
It could have been so different if he had chosen Wigan or Scunthorpe or even Man City, but maybe the cult of the underdog is a dying British tradition like hot cross buns. However easy it is to dismiss Leyland as an armchair arriviste with an innocent year-zero mindset, maybe those of us who still care about ticket prices, the number of foreign players and who owns the club are the freakish minority. We must be the weirdoes who still pay good money to cheer crap teams on cold nights when we could be watching the big boys for free on a laptop, ensconced in a warm room with a cool beer, like most fans do.
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