Is it anti-football to not want your club to be promoted to the Premier League? | OneFootball

What is the point of football?

On one hand, the goal is obvious: win as many games as you can, in the best division and against the best teams.

But for 99% of football clubs in England, that’s simply not realistic.

Maybe it is something less tangible then? Supporting a football club, especially one that does not win every week, feels like a lifelong investment – some days maybe good, some days maybe shit, but it is those shit days that can make you feel more attached to the club in a way. A form of masochism so that when (if) your club is ever good, you can point to the time you were 3-0 up at home and somehow lost 4-3 as a sign that you were there.

For the last few weeks, I have found myself increasingly asking what it is I like about football. I was born about 25 miles from Portman Road so my happiness has been inextricably tied to Ipswich Town.

For 90% of my life, the story of Ipswich has not been all that interesting. We spent a Championship-record 15 consecutive seasons in the second division, during which time we reached the playoffs only once and lost to our greatest rival Norwich (back to the masochism). Four out of five consecutive managers were called Paul, the only one who wasn’t was Mick McCarthy, whose most memorable moment came when he told travelling fans at Carrow Road to f**k off.

A slip down to League One felt inevitable, and by the time that it happened, I had accepted that my life as an Ipswich fan would just be a little more shit each year. That is until the club was identified as an investment opportunity by an Arizona state pension fund. Since then, Town fans can hardly believe what has taken place.

We made it out of League One but then pulled off a remarkable double promotion against teams flushed with parachute payment cash to reach the Premier League for the first time since 2002. On my deathbed, I will recall the day we clinched promotion as one of the best of my life, when I was one of thousands of Ipswich fans who invaded the pitch to celebrate up close with the players who had just pulled off a miracle.

If this was a movie, that’s where the credits would roll. Fairytale complete. The Promised Land reached. But life does not care for romantic endings.

The first Premier League season of my adult life began full of optimism, but opening games against Liverpool and Manchester City, the latter of which featured an Erling Haaland hat-trick, were a sobering wake-up to reality.

The first half of the season was not so bad, and we competed in almost every game even if were were unable to turn that into points. With the chance of survival going from possible to unrealistic, the players’ heads seemed to drop, and the second half of the campaign was a punishing watch in which the team won just one game. Looking forward to games at the weekend became preparing yourself for another tough afternoon.

It’s at times like this when you have loved ones – not indoctrinated into the world of football – asking you why you do it. Why not do something else? And you find yourself simply without a logical reason.

Come the summer, everyone at the club and the fans were happy to see the end of the season. While moving back to the Championship was a disappointment, it came with the benefit of actually being able to win some games. Two years on from beating the parachute payments, we were now the money side and, by a lot of predictions, the runaway favourites for the league.

Football, and in particular the Championship, does not always pan out the way you plan, and even if they have not broken the 106-point record that some predicted, Ipswich are once again seemingly on the verge of the Premier League. The question then is, what awaits us there?

Back-to-back seasons of the promoted sides coming straight back down had every Championship fan fearing they would be next if they ever made it up, and while Sunderland have bucked the trend, the plight of Burnley this year looks very familiar.

So once again, what is the point of football? If the desire is to play at the highest level then 20th in the Premier League is better than first in the Championship, but ask Rob Edwards which of the two fanbases he has managed this season are happier and the answer will be Middlesbrough.

On one hand, of course, you want your club to go up. You want to see your team play against the best sides in the best stadiums against the best players, but doing so as a promoted side means almost certainly agreeing to being the whipping boys of the division. A part of me would be happy to win every game in the Championship and yet, for some FA administrative reason, be forced to stay there the following season.

For what it’s worth, I think a year in the top flight will have taught the club and Kieran McKenna a lot of lessons, and we would make a better fist of it than the 22 points we managed last time, but I look at the current squad and fear it is a long way off Premier League quality.

I would imagine the same thoughts were in the heads of Coventry fans early in the year and Middlesbrough fans too. Fans of Millwall, Hull, Preston and Wrexham will all be dreaming of a season in the Premier League but for teams like Southampton, memories of what happened before may make the Premier League a place to be feared.

As a kid, I thought the Premier League was the be all and end all but as I’ve grown older, I’ve realised there is often a lot more joy to be found away from the most commercialised league in the world. Ten minutes of stoppage time was added to a Championship game recently after a squirrel ran on the pitch, reminding us all of the Sunday League-ness of football that we love.

So I find myself in two minds about a potential promotion. On one hand, we could have a summer of recruitment like Sunderland, learn from our mistakes of last time and stay up, but even that means losing more games than you win. On the other, it could go horribly wrong and we find ourselves enduring a season like Wolves fans are now.

And while I will may not be able to admit it on the day we lose the play-off final to Norwich, there will be the smallest part of me happy to remain a big fish in a smaller pond. The water is warm.