Football clubs should stand for something, and at Grimsby we’re aiming high

There are several reasons to choose a football team to support but more often than not your club chooses you. Proximity to where you are born, live or a family inheritance are the most likely reasons to bind you to club colours. For those too young to know better, success can be alluring. As a nine-year-old, I flirted briefly with supporting Nottingham Forest, at a time when they won back‑to‑back European Cups in 1979 and 1980, but it was like a holiday romance that faded quickly through a lack of real-world contact.

For international fans, I can understand it can be different and more of a free choice. You are buying into a brand or product experience intermediated through the internet or TV. To simply choose a Premier League team because they are successful seems insubstantial, though. It’s a consumer’s approach to something that requires no real commitment if a team are at the top of their game. That’s why I was so compelled by how Lars Olav Sæther, a Grimsby Town fan based in Norway, felt destiny calling him to our club.

As a young boy, Lars was walking along the cliffs near his home in Hvaler when he noticed a styrofoam box had been washed ashore with the word “Grimsby” in large letters printed along its side. Jostein Jensen, another Norwegian supporter, alerted me to Lars’s story and concluded: “After looking into encyclopaedias he found out that Grimsby was one of UK’s largest fishing ports. He also found out that the town had a football team, since then he has followed the club.” Whatever way you come to identify with a team, it creates a psychological continuity as we grow older. Subsuming the club’s history into your own story can act as what the writer and comedian Kevin Day calls “the baseline to your life”.