• Premier League

Jose Mourinho's right - football fans really do matter

One of the advantages sport has over other forms of entertainment is the sense that your actually being there can affect what happens in front of your eyes.

If you go to watch Les Misérables (as an unfortunate friend was forced to do, by his wife, during England v Germany in Euro 1996) then you can pretty much guarantee that whether you are having a good time or a terrible time, the people on stage will be ploughing through 'I Dreamed A Dream' and the rest of it oblivious to you ... unless someone in the audience has snuck in a transistor radio and is yelping in joy, and despair, at a football match he's listening to through an earpiece. Although that's another story, and one that ends in a divorce.

Jose Mourinho expects more from both the Chelsea players and fans © Getty Images

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Musicals, theatre, concerts, and the cinema (obviously) unfold in front of your eyes no matter what. I suppose rock gigs and stand-up comedy performances differ from night to night depending on the energy of the crowd, but the songs and routines only vary by a few per cent. Only at live sport do you get the sense that your presence, the feelings you transmit to the performers, the support and encouragement you give - or don't give - can make them run faster, hit harder, play better.

Football provides that sensation better than any other sport. And while it is tempting, and indeed logical, to think of football clubs as faceless corporate machines who view the fan as no more than a walking wallet, by going to the match and behaving as you do when you are there, you actually play a part in the outcome.

Jose Mourinho this weekend lamented the poor atmosphere at Stamford Bridge. As ever with Jose, perhaps it was a clever method of deflecting attention away from his players, or laying down the groundwork for an excuse if things go awry later in the season. Certainly, only a manager whose team had taken 26 points out of 30 could get away with such apparently deliberate antagonism of the core support.

"At this moment it's difficult for us to play at home though, because playing here is like playing in an empty stadium," Mourinho said. "The team then starts playing like it's a quiet, soft game at home."

In his own inimitable style, he's making the point that the fans' lack of enthusiasm is transmitting itself to the players.

Those fans at Chelsea might well say that they've paid their money and they'll do what they want, but Chelsea wouldn't be the first top team to suffer from a sense of complacency born of too much easy success. When you go to watch a team win every week, you start to take it for granted pretty quickly. Maybe the fans are just shocked into silence by the ticket prices.

Manchester City battled to a nervy 1-0 win over United that ought to have been far more comfortable © Getty Images

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Chelsea's only realistic title rivals, Manchester City, suffered another type of unintended influence from their support this weekend. While any self-respecting City fan is obviously enjoying Manchester United's worst start to the season since Big Ron was sacked in 1986, there is no doubt that the game against United is their biggest game of the year. You could argue that this is evidence of a lingering small-time mentality, but having been in the shadow of United for so long, they not unreasonably fear their beleaguered neighbours climbing off the canvas, against all the odds, to land a lucky blow.

And so it was that, playing against a shambolic United side who were reduced to 10 men, City's fans nevertheless managed to transmit an anxiety and fear of failure to their players, who made a meal of the victory. Any long-term City fan carries at the back of his or her mind the nagging sense that City will do something City-ish sooner or later, that all this money and success has actually been a terrible mistake and, in fact, they are going to be bounced back to the third tier and managed by Alan Curbishley while United go off and conquer Saturn.

No amount of on-field success can entirely change a club's ingrained culture and self-image, and that's what the City fans were conveying to their players on Sunday. They talk of a "12th man" or a crowd "sucking the ball into the net". It can work the other way as well. And, in an era where the clubs would really rather you just turned up and behaved yourself and spent lots of money on official merchandise, it's good to remember that the fans do matter to the result, for good or ill.

Alan Tyers writes for the Daily Telegraph, ESPNcricinfo and is the author of six books, the most recent of which is 'Tutenkhamen's Tracksuit: The History of Sport in 100ish Objects'

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