Last year a poll found that British adults make, on average, 122 decisions every day. A decade earlier a professor at Columbia University found that Americans make about 70. In 2011 a survey of Britons commissioned by a video game developer put the figure at a damningly low 27, essentially painting British adults as a breed of permanently hungry morons most frequently vexed by issues such as “what to have for dinner”, “what to have for breakfast”, “what to have in my sandwich”, and “tea or coffee”. All three surveys polled precisely 2,000 people, suggesting that researchers into decision-making are terrified of making independent decisions.
In 2006 Cornell University found that people make 221 decisions a day about food alone (though they only surveyed staff and pupils at Cornell University, who probably do a bit more thinking than average). Meanwhile the estimate most commonly cited online, of uncertain origin, suggests we in fact make 35,000 decisions a day and an article published by the British Medical Journal in 2020, with references and everything, put the figure at “between 10,000 and 40,000”.
In short, researchers have been producing wildly contrasting and evidentially suspicious figures on this subject for decades, varying so much that if I started taking decisions at birth (probably a bit optimistic) some believe I will by now have made about 479,000, and others more like 710,000,000. Either way, I’ve certainly had enough practice to find them less painful than I sometimes do. If Malcolm Gladwell was anywhere near right with his 10,000-hour rule, I would be a master decision-maker by now, a veritable virtuoso of dilemma-dodging. I would be bulldozing my way past common quandaries like a belligerent but brilliant and misunderstood cabinet minister striding briskly down a corridor crowded with conspiring snowflake enemies of the people. Instead the past fortnight has been pure torture.
The decision in question: should I give up my season ticket? And then the issues arising from it: what does it say about me that I’m even considering it? What kind of supporter am I? What kind of person?
There’s no need to drag out the suspense, for the decision has been made. For only the second time in my adult life I could feasibly hold a season ticket at Watford next year but have chosen not to. The last time it happened they promptly won their division, so this may be just the boost the club needs. Either way this is not the end, but I think it would benefit us both if we spent some time apart.
In many ways, the decision was not just easy but inevitable. The club is obviously a shambles. A charitable assessment of the team would be that over time they have been issued with so many different tactical instructions by so many different coaches that, come match day, a bewildered starting XI play as if at least a dozen different gameplans are in simultaneous and wildly chaotic operation. They play like a choir in which most members sing their own song in their own language and to their own tune, while the remainder just mime. The result: a technically impressive, completely meaningless noise. “You’re never going to achieve anything if you’ve got complete inconsistency running through your team,” says Chris Wilder, the current head coach. Who wants to sit through that 23 times a season?
One voice never heard in this cacophony is that of the owner, Gino Pozzo, who has ignored English journalists for a decade and recently deigned to commit to a public meeting with a group of supporters for the first time ever, albeit at an unspecified future date and in an unknown format.
Never have I experienced such a disconnect between a team and their fanbase. A year ago I watched a group with which I felt no real affinity stutter to relegation from the Premier League and hoped that in the relative obscurity of the Championship our relationship might be redefined and I would somehow come to see in it a reflection of myself. This year they have been lazy and underachieving (not those bits of myself, you bastards!) and the last frayed cords of connection have snapped. We have come, in the end, to treat each other with total disdain. Like the participants in many failing relationships, it is clear that we both dread the time we spend in each other’s company. We barely even acknowledge each other: they run around occasionally looking interested; I sit occasionally making strange groaning noises. And then we both leave. Also, my seat isn’t that great.
There will be some people, unfamiliar with the concept of paying to be repeatedly inconvenienced, miserable and cold, who do not understand how any kind of dilemma exists here. The idea of doing this to yourself is manifestly imbecilic. But for football supporters, turning your back on your team is treachery. Our job is not just to enjoy the good times but to endure the bad. Turning up to watch a successful team means nothing; it is buying expensive season tickets for rubbish ones that defines us. More than that, it is only by enduring the bad that we can appreciate the good. Misery is an investment in future happiness. But still, enough.
There have been bad times before. I have watched teams that made me feel angry, players who made me feel terrified and bewildered, and still I came back for more. Far more worrying is a team that make me feel … nothing. Over time an unwritten contract develops to bind each fan with their club. Its precise wording will be unique to each individual and in the final analysis I found my team in breach of that contract this season and have chosen to exercise a break clause. I truly hope I regret it. Now, what’s for breakfast?
