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It has often been said that the football team you support is the only thing in your entire life that you can never change. No matter what your team does on the pitch, relegation, poor football, or off the pitch, dodgy dealing, selling your best players, you are stuck with them for life. Woe betide anyone who dares to speak out against your team. It's like your parents, you are allowed to moan about them as much as you like, but nobody else is.

So why is this unbreakable bond formed? One third of marriages end in divorce, but no relationship with a football club is ever ended.

There are five main reasons why you are trapped in your love for one club. You may be able to overcome one or two of them, but you can never defeat them all.

1. You fall in love
Love is defined as: A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.

Substitute the word 'person' and replace it with club, and you have the perfect description of a relationship with a football team.

I was seven when I first set foot in Vicarage Road, the home of Watford FC. Within minutes, I had fallen in love. The colors, the smells, the crowd, the atmosphere, were all overwhelming. The excitement in the build up to the teams coming on to the pitch was thrilling, and remains to this day, some thirty-nine years later.

I felt a part of something with the other four or five thousand people who were there with me wanting the same thing, supporting the same side, and feeling the same feelings. I was part of a massive gang. It was heady stuff and a feeling that stays with you forever.

2. They become your friends
I feel that the Watford board, management and players are my friends. I've never met any of them, and they might be really nasty people for all I know, but I like them all. I feel able to pass comment and judgment on them. I feel that I can shout advice, praise, criticism, and sometimes, personal abuse.

I feel able to do this about perfect strangers. I wouldn't walk up to a street cleaner I've never met and criticize his cleaning, or his hair cut, or his attitude, but I can do it to the Watford players because they are my mates.

3. People spend a fortune on you
Once you announce your support for a team, everyone you know begins to spend money on you. For birthday's and Christmas you receive a never ending range of goods with your teams badge and name on. From a replica shirt to a pair

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