Football and Beer, the Perfect Mix. Where there is football there is beer

Football and Beer

Saw a t-shirt the other day that said “football, beer and women”. Are you crazy? Why ruin it by bringing a woman along, let her off to the shops or whatever, but football and beer is only a time for male bonding. Can worry about women later, much later. ….

Now when I say football I mean association football and not that rubbish that the yanks play that goes on for hours and is played around kentuckfuckingchicken advertisements. The one that over 90% of the world plays, the one with a World Cup, you know, real football!

So where there is football there is beer, like night follows day, football fans drink beer, and lots of it.

Why is it so? Well I guess football as a sport that rose up from the working classes, from the bottom, where working men played the game, hard drinking men who liked to drink in real pubs drinking real drink. Working class areas in any city in the world have football teams. They don’t play rugby or cricket, or tennis or golf, its football. People in these places tend to drink beer. Wine is too posh, and sipping fancy cocktails is hardly going to endure yourself to your mates.

Anyway this football and beer malarkey is a dream for beer companies in the advertisement wars. Heineken sponsor the Champions League, Carlsberg the last Euros, while Budweiser sponsored the last world cup. Carling was a sponsor of the English premier, we have the Budweiser FA Cup, and a huge number of teams are sponsored by beer companies. Tell me the last time a Wine was sponsored on a football shirt? During a big football game expect a huge hike in the amount of beer sold. Imagine how many beers will be drowned this coming summer for the world cup in Brazil.

Beer gives the buzz, and the game seals the deal. Win, lose or draw, back to the pub for the pints to regurgitate the game, and dish the centre forward for missing what your granny could score or some shite like that.

There are generally three types of football fan. The fanatic, the guy who knows everything about his team, all the stats going back years, he has a long log of games he has seen live, and knows the pubs to drink in when near any ground you care to mention. The man who lives and breathes football. Then there is the normal fan, the guy who can take it and leave it, whose life isn’t totally controlled by football. And the final fan is the flirt (the glory hunter), who just likes to go along with all the fun and be part of something big, the largest group.

I have seen guys who have travelled long distances to only have the drink and the fun outside the stadium, who have travelled just for the beer, the banter, and if they so wish for, a punch up.

So its world cup year and I will be off the radar for the whole months of June and July, more or less two whole months of football, TV, beer and having a good time. Too early to predict who will win, Germany, Brazil (and a dodgy ref), or Uruguay (people say dark horse, but they have won it more times than England!), but what I can predict is I will have a good time anyway. Thank God for beer and football!