“You’re so annoying, my God,” João Cancelo complains, leaning out of his open car window with the indignation of a man at a drive-through who has just been handed the Smarties McFlurry when he specifically ordered the Oreo. “You’re here every day. Do I have to stop my car every day?
“Quickly, quickly,” he scolds them, as the procession of teenagers persists, posing for photos and handing him various objects to sign. Eventually, after an encounter lasting less than a couple of minutes, Cancelo drives away from the Barcelona training ground, leaving in his wake a pall of awkwardness, as well as some of the most reluctant selfies ever committed to a memory chip.
Of course, this is a scene that could have unfolded at any point in the history of sport. Pretty much all of us emerge from our youth with tales of autograph heartbreak, tales of rejection or refusal that scar us more deeply than is wise to admit. Andy Clarke, Wimbledon striker of the mid-1990s, would it have killed you to give the pen a second try rather than simply dropping it on the ground and walking away? You gotta call me, man. I’ll be the biggest fan you ever lose. Sincerely yours, Jonathan. PS: You were a yard offside and you knew it.
But then Cancelo broke the cardinal rule of fan interaction in the smartphone age: anything you say or do may be given in social media evidence. Within hours the exchange was being shared online, with Cancelo eventually forced to explain his conduct on Instagram, describing the offending fans as “20‑year‑old kids who are there every day, asking for autographs and selling them later”. He added: “This is repeated every day, and always by the same people. True fans I will always respect.”
Welcome to the new frontline of fan-athlete engagement. An arena in which England supporters in Sunderland, outraged at the refusal of the Lionesses to meet and greet them after the recent game against Scotland, start a chant of “Get off the bus!”
Where Liudmila Samsonova finishes a match at the Zhengzhou Open and is immediately pelted with giant tennis balls, caps and towels hurled from the stands for her to sign. Where you can scarcely move at a football ground for “CAN I HAVE YOUR SHIRT?” signs, some of them even professionally printed and wielded by grown adults.
We are, of course, straying on to daringly licentious territory. Pretty much the foundational precept of elite sport is that the fans are a kind of sacred corpus, the noble soul of the enterprise. Their motives must never be impugned or questioned. Their songs are hymns and their banter is always hilarious. For a coach or player, “turning on the fans” is pretty much the worst crime imaginable. The fans were always “immense last night”. Everybody’s fans are invariably “the best in the world”.
Which is a lovely sentiment, albeit a worldview that largely disintegrates on the merest contact with an actual fan, whether they’re leaving bile in the comments or disturbing you in the supermarket or urinating 12 cans of Punk IPA against your Toyota Corolla. But then the part can never be representative of the whole; this is perhaps what Cancelo was getting at when he made the distinction between the youths at the Barcelona training ground and the “true fans” he will always revere. True fans would never wait outside his place of work and ask him to sign things. A true fan would know that João Cancelo wants to be left in peace.
But, by the same token, something really does seem to have shifted here, a subtle recalibration of the relationship between sports stars and their public, an erosion of the simple compact by which you entertain us and we come and watch. Perhaps the turning point in this regard was the “CAN I HAVE YOUR SHIRT?” sign brandished at Eden Hazard by a young Chelsea fan in early 2018. Hazard walked over and, with no inkling of the madness he was about to unleash on the world, handed over his jersey in a gesture widely described by social anthropologists as a “real classy touch”.
If that had been that, we could all have enjoyed the endorphins for a few seconds and moved on with our lives. Instead, the shirt supplication has now become an established ritual, a kind of etiquette test for the professional athlete, who must now choose the worthiest-looking petitioner from the sea of entreaties. A child, obviously. That one’s got glasses. But that one’s in a wheelchair. But does the dad look like he might put it on eBay? But what if they’re waiting for you outside?
On the other side of the perimeter, meanwhile, an entirely logical sense of entitlement pervades. You need us. You owe us. Our enforcement methods will be social media shaming and the blinking white light of a phone camera. This is fandom as consumer transaction: the inevitable upshot of a sporting culture that sees its public as essentially a commodity, a resource to be mined. Well, I want a selfie for the ’gram, and you want to look good in public. Stop your car. Get off the bus. Let’s do business.
And really we may have passed the point of no return here. The interface between athletes and fans is now so limited and heavily policed – by PR people, by the widening gulfs in wealth and life experience, and often by actual police – that any meaningful interaction between them has become all but impossible. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to drive to Andy Clarke’s house before he gets home from work.
