Now it all depends on whether you’re American, English, Irish or Australian who all embrace their football game.
It’s in the human DNA you see since the day Cain decided to kick Abel’s skull into a ditch.
So here are some thoughts on some of the teams I’ve adopted from my travels.
Off Pat
New England Patriots: I don’t know if you’re allowed it but I adopt all the American sports teams wherever I go.
It does make it easier to pick a winner if you’ve got the New York Jets (my Long Island cousins’-team), the Washington Redskins who are now looking for a new team, and the Denver Broncos.
It’s just that you go with the team where you spend the most time… and that was my summer after university in Boston.
Hoop dreams
And I had little choice growing up in Glasgow in the Seventies where Catholics and Protestants didn’t mix to choose Celtic.
Particularly as my Great-Uncles had built Celtic Park.
But Scots kids were allowed too to have an English team and I chose Liverpool.
Forward fast to the Nineties, had a son on Merseyside and it came full circle with The Son and Heir becoming a fully-fledged Red.
GAA-GAA
In Ireland, soccer (football) was known as a Garrison game, a preserve of the occupying British Army.
And Gaelic Football, Camogie (the female version) and the stick game hurling were the Irish sports.
I could pick any of Donegal, my Dear Old Mum’s county, Dublin where I worked for 13 years or Co. Wicklow, my adopted home.
But as my Mum drummed it into us as kids that Donegal was the best place on Earth.
And that the rest of Ireland hate serial winners Dublin, it has to be Donegal.
Perth, WA
My bonds with Western Australia started when my parents took me back a jersey of the West Coast Eagles. Minus the sleeves of course.
And continued when I joined a Top Deck booze bus to the Oktoberfest in Munich and discovered they were all Aussies and Kiwis.
Fast forward six months and Brownie and Smutley had arrived on my Aberdeen doorstep and went on to set up a WA colony there with their friends.
My one and only Aussie Rules football game was with an English guy at Surrey’s cricket ground, The Oval.
I remember Collingwood were one of the teams but don’t recall the other.
Collingwood are the New England Patriots, Dublin or Manchester United of their country.
Everybody else dislikes them unless you’re one of them.
MEET YOU ON THE PITCH