Darragh McGee

There's a kind of melancholy, a sadness to fandom in the sense that a lot of fans get into the rhythm that you've just mentioned, betting against their team so that either way there's a high, there's a dopamine hit.

And all of this kind of rewires fandom in ways that I think we don't think enough about.

Yes, and yeah, that's just as important to the book.

No, that's right.

What you're laying out there is the kind of social dimension to all this.

And of course, there is an irony that a lot of the marketing for gambling draws on the social dimension.

It actually, in many ways, sells gambling as an add-on to your social life, something to do, something to discuss among friends.

But the reality, of course, is that

You know, it is solitary.

It has added a kind of isolation to fandom.

Even when you're sitting amongst friends, a lot of young men I find, or they tell me, you know, I'm kind of, I'm somewhere else.

Yes, the somewhere else being in the title of the book, Imitation Games.

And so absolutely, to be fair though, you can't lay all of that at the door of the gambling firms.

We all live in an attention economy now, and it's fair to say we're all being drawn in different directions.

And that purist take on your first World Cup, I mean, yeah, part of me thinks that there is something about fandom that's been lost there.

Gambling's just part of that.

I mean, the story is extraordinary.

You know, I had to check myself at several points and kind of research and write in this book that that this firm that in many ways was under fire from, you know, the Brits, as they were labeled at the time, you know, the big British bookmakers who were more powerful and more profitable.

I mean, Paddy Power kind of is born out of the need to resist them coming over to Ireland and taking over, really, and to have the brazenness then to fight that off and say, you know what, I think our humour might work across the water.

I mean, it's a remarkable story from there on that Paddy Power used this kind of humorous shtick that they have.