Summer is a time of optimism for fans. The combination of new signings, managers and beginnings is the recipe for a heady, fantastical concoction. Forget about everything that went wrong in the 12 months before, the slate has been wiped clean. Hope trumps cynicism and everything feels possible as the season gets under way, at which point reality begins to take hold.
This isn’t new. One of the more counterintuitive joys of fandom is revelling in negativity to the point where it almost becomes a competition to see who can absorb the most comic ineptitude. Treating incompetence with humour is a way to maintain sanity, like Cheryl David sighing and rolling her eyes at her husband’s latest bout of calamitous behaviour in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The problem with this approach, however, is that everyone has a line and one of the main takeaways from the first two months of the Premier League season is how much unhappiness there is in the stands.
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Transfer fees went wild but few teams have improved and anger tends to follow when hype is revealed to be empty rhetoric
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