It is probable that if the readership of another soccer magazine had been surveyed, the results would have reflected the views of the sort of supporter who read that magazine. Nevertheless, since so little research has been done around the loyalty of soccer fans and its development, and given that WSC is representative of at least a certain sort of football supporter, the findings can be said to go at least some of the way to explaining the bonds between supporters and their clubs. Our WSC readers were asked a number of questions about how they came to support their club including, for example, questions concerning when they first became fans of that club, with whom they attended their first live game and what factors influenced them in supporting that particular club. This would seem to suggest that male relatives are far more important than their female counterparts in influencing a fan's allegiance to a club. We will return to the importance of family members as an influence on supporting choices in a moment.
Boys seem to develop an attachment to a football club earlier than girls.
It is often said that supporters of 'Big 5' clubs come from a wider area than fans of smaller teams. Our survey would suggest that there is some truth in this. Over half of the 'Big 5' supporters in our sample lived over eleven miles from their team's ground when they started supporting. Other research by the Sir Norman Chester Centre supports the argument that bigger, more successful clubs attract fans from a wider area. In 1990, a study of fans of Glasgow Rangers, one of Scotland's biggest teams, found that over a quarter of Rangers supporters travelled to home games from the area immediately around Glasgow, some of them regularly coming from England and even from Northern Ireland.