It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Football League Fixtures are announced!
A strange twilight zone exists in the lives of football fans. It lasts for about six weeks across late spring and early summer, and ends on an indeterminate weekday just before the Solstice. It begins for most in early May. Those who support teams involved in the play-offs are able to ward off this horrible limbo for up to a further fortnight, and also have the bonus of not having as long to wait in feverish anticipation of that ostensibly unremarkable day. Fans of non-league clubs have it worse than fans of teams in the top four divisions – they have to wait even longer for their moment of truth. This is a day when a confession is finally extracted from a computer which has been holding the secrets of what legions of us will be doing with our weekends from August to May. This is the the day that the Premier and Football League fixtures are made public.
Manchester City won their second Premier League title in 2013-14 in Manuel Pellegrini’s first season in England
Why celebrate such domesticity when a World Cup is on? I love the World Cup, but the fact it only happens every four years is a key part of its appeal. The appeal of the domestic football season is its omnipresence, and the structure it gives to nine months of a fan’s life. When the clock strikes 9am on 18 June, numerous people around the country will begin to pour over the bounty, make the plans that they have been unable to for the last six weeks and get online to buy train tickets to destinations near and far as cheaply as they can, praying that fixture changes do not interfere. Many internal monologues about the feasibility of getting to a ground 200 plus miles away on a Tuesday night and going to work the next day will be going on from Plymouth to Carlisle.
However, as inevitable as family arguments over the Christmas Day game of Monopoly, this day also has a downside to temper its magic. The dread of a fixture that you’d earmarked as a ‘must do’ game falling on a day when you know you will have an unavoidable commitment is ever present throughout the limbo period. Those loved ones who have the temerity to want to share the joy of their wedding day with you will be seriously unimpressed by your declining their invitation because you had planned to go to Preston away on their special day. A desire to come home early from holiday to attend a home game against Rotherham is not going to pass muster with the family you have gone with. Fans working out the true costs of their season ticket when taking into account the games they will miss is another unwelcome corollary of this day, a football fan’s equivalent of realising you have run out of petals to pick after saying “he/she loves me not”.
Fixture release day is, on one level, the day when fans feel like we can get our lives and our routines back again. Its deeper appeal, is that it represents football support in microcosm. We make an emotional investment in its outcome, we know that we will not always like what it gives us. But, we continue to love it because it produces a written contract which says our football club is promising nine more months of being there for us.
What game do you look for first when the fixture list is announced?
The Offside Rule 
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