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of cuff-links. From a drinking mug, to a duvet cover.

Once everything you own has your teams logo on it, and your family and friends have spent a small fortune on buying them it is very difficult to say, 'Actually, I don't support them now.'

4. You learn to hate others
Very quickly after finding a team to support you develop an irrational hatred of others. This is normally the team located nearest to yours, geographically. In my case, I had to hate the team from 20 miles up the M1 motorway, Luton Town. I managed to achieve this very quickly. I had never been to Luton and I had friends who came from there. In fact, my Auntie and Uncle lived in a small village on the outskirts of the Bedfordshire town. I had no logical or rational reason to dislike Luton or anything about them. But I did.

I still do today. As a grown adult with a reasonable education and a liberal outlook on life I hate everything about Luton Town simply because they are the nearest football team to mine.

5. You invest your life
To go to every home game in a season will cost in the region of 840 pounds for tickets, 100 pounds for programs, 100 pounds for burgers and coffees, making a total of over one thousand pounds. If you take one son with you that figure can be doubled.

In terms of time, you will spend 80 hours in the ground and in my case, another 80 hours traveling to and from the games. Add on the time reading books about them, reading reports about the games and catching up with the latest news on the website, you can probably add another 400 hours.

All together this means that you will spend two thousand pounds each season, or 8% of the national average wage, and 560 hours, or nearly 10% of your waking hours, following your team.

When you invest this much into following something that you have loved since you were little, there is no way you can ever stop.

Learn more about this author, Graham Fisher.
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