How to Decide What Soccer Team to Support?

Soccer is a great source of entertainment around the world. However, if you as a soccer fan do not decide on which team to support till the end of time, then you won’t enjoy soccer as much. The community behind a soccer team is one of the things that soccer fans enjoy the most about soccer.

So the real question becomes, how to decide what soccer team to support?

To Decide what soccer team to support, start with a large pool of teams that you are interested in and narrow the pool down by asking yourself a series of questions that will eventually lead you to a soccer team that you most likely should support.

But what kind of questions should you ask in order to narrow down the pool of candidate teams that you should pick from?

Here’s a decision tree that will help you out.

The rest of the article will be explaining how the above decision tree works and why you should ask the questions that are mentioned in it.

So, first of all…

How do you pick a pool of soccer teams that you might want to support?

You want to pick a soccer club that either competes in one of the top soccer leagues around the worlds or a soccer team that is local to your area.

If you can find a team that is both local to your area and is competing at one of the top soccer leagues in the world, then that is great news.

For example, if you live in Spain Madrid, then you should most probably pick either Real Madrid or Atletico Madrid to support since both of them are local teams to you and both of them compete in La Liga, which is one of the top soccer leagues in the world.

However, if you live in the US, then you might not find Major League Soccer (MLS) as competitive as the European soccer, so you might want to make sure that the team you support is from one of the European top soccer leagues.

Usually, the soccer clubs that are widely known as the top soccer leagues around the world are the Premier league (United Kingdom), La Liga (Spain), Serie A (Italy), Bundesliga (Germany), and Ligue 1 (France).

So, it is preferable that you support one of the teams that compete in these top leagues if you want to enjoy watching soccer matches to the fullest.

Note that it doesn’t hurt if you decide to support 2 soccer clubs at the same time. For example, you can support one of your local soccer clubs, and also support a club that competes in one of the top soccer leagues.

As long as the 2 teams that you support will most probably never compete against each other, then you can just support both of them. More on this later in this article

Now that you have a large pool of soccer clubs that you can support, you need to keep asking yourselves questions to narrow down the pool and eventually end up with a few clubs to pick from.

Here are some of the questions that you should ask:

1- Can I watch the team on TV?

Soccer teams usually play at least once a week. The beauty of supporting a soccer club is that you can follow their journey as they compete weekly against other teams and win points in order to reach the top of the league that they are competing in.

However, if you can’t watch your team’s matches on TV and you can’t go watch them in the stadium regularly, then what’s the point of supporting them in the first place?

In other words, make sure that the matches of the soccer team that you want to support are broadcasted on the networks that usually broadcast soccer matches.

Most of the time, the matches from the top soccer leagues are easy to find on TV since a lot of broadcasters are interested in airing these games and making profit from them.

However, you might not always be able to find on TV the small and local teams that are in your area if they do not compete in well known soccer leagues.

2- Does the team have a large fanbase and a great history?

Supporting a soccer team that has a great fanbase is always more fun. The community behind the team will be bigger, stronger, and usually better.

Soccer fans around the world are what made soccer the most famous sport around the world. Being part of a large soccer community that supports a certain club is what soccer is all about.

Supporting a soccer club with a great fan base will allow you to share your victories and your losses with a larger number of people. You’ll be able to participate in the hundreds of thousands of discussions that take place on social media after every game your team plays.

Also, supporting a soccer club that has a great history is a great idea. Even if the team isn’t performing very well during the current seasons. If they have a great soccer history, then they are worthy of being supported.

Just make sure that you do not base your decision of which team to support only on the performance of the team in the most recent soccer seasons.

There are soccer teams that excel during one soccer season, and then disappear throughout the rest of the decade.

And of course, there are soccer clubs that have a huge history but aren’t performing great recently. You should prioritize these clubs over the others because they will most probably make a comeback and reclaim their place on the top.

A great example can be the Liverpool club. Liverpool FC is a club with a huge history and an awesome fanbase. However, during the 2010s decade, the club suffered a lot and was close to bankruptcy, yet they managed to make a comeback and they reclaimed their position as one of the top soccer clubs around the world.

Liverpool FC fans kept chanting their famous phrase “You will never walk alone” to their club during the hard times, and they kept their faith and trust in their club until the club made their huge comeback.

Other clubs with no history at all managed to shine for one or two seasons and then disappeared completely from the spotlight.

So, if you’re new to soccer, make sure that you prioritize soccer clubs with a great history over the clubs that are currently performing well but do not have a good history in soccer.

3- Do any of your friends or family support the club or its rival?

If you have friends that support a certain club that fits the previously mentioned points, then you should either support the club too, or you should support their biggest rival club that also fits the previous mentioned points.

But why?

Watching soccer with friends and family is extremely fun. It’s always great to watch soccer with other people.

In order for both of you and your friends to be interested in watching a game, the team that you or them support has to be competing in the game. In other words, if you and your friends support the same soccer club, then you’ll both be interested in watching the games of these clubs together and this will make watching soccer much more fun.

Supporting your friend’s most rival team however is on a completely different level of entertainment. When the team that you support, and the team that your friend supports face each other, the tension and the excitement that you’ll get from watching the match with your friend are just priceless.

I live among friends and family members that love soccer. We used to gather together in a single room during every el clasico match. We were around 10 people and we were almost evenly split between FC Barcelona supporters and Real Madrid CF supporters.

During these matches, every pass, every goal, every chance and every kick were extremely dramatic and were extremely fun to watch among such a group of people.

If you don’t know what El clasico is, it’s basically a match between the soccer clubs rivals FC Barcelona and Real Madrid FC.

If you are interested, you can check this article that talks more about the rivalry between soccer clubs and what a match between these rivals is called.

So the main take away from all this is that you should support a soccer club that some of your friends and family support, or the rival club of the clubs that your friends and family support. If you do so, you’ll raise your level of excitement for soccer matches to a whole new level.

Making the final decision of which soccer club you should support.

After you ask yourself the questions mentioned above, you should be left with a small list of soccer clubs that you might want to support. But how to pick which one to support from this list?

First of all, you should prioritize the ones that are local to where you live. As mentioned before, if one of your local soccer clubs is also one of the top soccer clubs around the world, then you should most probably support them.

But if none of the remaining soccer clubs are local to where you live, then you can watch how these soccer clubs play and decide on which one to support based on that.

Soccer clubs have different styles on the field. Some clubs prefer to use the Tiki-taka tactics and slowly build up for a goal, other clubs prefer to depend on counter attacks and quick goals.

So, the tie-breaker should be the style of playing that the remaining clubs use on the field. Pick the team with the style of playing that you mostly like.

And there you have it. This is how you decide what soccer team you should support. Before I end this article however, I want to make some quick notes that are related to this topic.

Changing the club that you support isn’t something that you should do.

Once you pick a soccer team to support, do not think about changing it no matter what the circumstances are. If you get used to switching your support from one soccer club to another based on their performances, then you won’t enjoy soccer as much as when you pick one club and follow it till the end of time.

In many countries around the world, changing the soccer club that you support is as hard as changing the religion that you were born with.

For example, in countries like Argentina and Brazil, children will be heavily inspired by their parents when they decide what soccer club to support. The parents will buy the jerseys of the soccer clubs that they support and give them to their children.

soccer fan wearing a soccer jersey

If you’re interested in learning more about why soccer is so popular in Brazil, you can check this article.

There are many other countries that are heavily interested in soccer. As a child, I was surrounded by a lot of FC Barcelona jerseys, FC Barcelona clothes, and soccer balls that had FC Barcelona’s Logo on them. So to me, changing the soccer club that I support isn’t an easy thing to do.

What I am trying to say here is that you should make sure that you do not change your favorite soccer team after you pick one or else you won’t be able to enjoy the culture of soccer as much.

Avoid supporting more than one soccer team.

It’s always better if you avoid supporting 2 or more soccer teams, however if you have to support more than one, make sure that the teams that you support play in totally different leagues and that they will almost never face each other in a soccer match.

Putting all of your time and effort into supporting one team will let you dive more into the community of that team and will let you enjoy the soccer culture even more.

However as mentioned before. If you want to support your local team just to encourage them and push them forward, then go for it even if you pick another team from another league as your favorite team too.

SUMMARY

In order to pick a team to support, you should ask yourself questions like: what are the top soccer leagues in the world? What are the teams that have a great fan base and a great history? What teams do my friends and family support? And then you should base your decision of what soccer club to support on the answers of these questions.

Finally, make sure that you support the team that you pick till the end and that you don’t support more than one team unless extremely necessary.