​I have a confesson to make. No, I can't quite match the drama and pathos of a Lance Armstrong or Tiger Woods mea culpa, but I might just be about to commit the most mortal of sins for a sports fan.

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It’s like this. I don’t like a sporting team I’ve supported for nearly 40 years…and I want to end our relationship.

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I have to confess that I have been faking it for a few years now, sleeping in separate beds and keeping up appearances so no one will talk about us. But it is now time for my childhood sweetheart and I to part company.

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The break-up has been coming for some time. I’ve had counselling, late-night drinking sessions, therapy, even went looking for answers on Google. But the decisive moment came during a recent conversation with a fellow sports fan about team loyalty.

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We were talking about various sports-related scandals and he confessed that, at times, it had been difficult to support his team through some of the controversies. Some were alcohol-related, some were just the bitter in-fighting of a dysfunctional club. And, invariably, they were salacious tales which made embarrassing reading for the club, fans and the sport.

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But it was this sports fan’s admission that he was not always fond of the team he had supported for decades which got me thinking about whether it is OK to call in the divorce lawyers on a sporting relationship.

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For many sports fans, the choice of a footy team to support is simple. They live in the same town/city/district/region, and there is an immediate bond shared by being a part of the community.

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For many others, there is no such link.  Think of all those people who support an AFL team in Melbourne who don’t come from Victoria. Likewise, all those people in country NSW and Queensland who adopted an NRL club in Sydney as “their team”.

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But these sporting allegiances are often formed on a tenuous basis by a supporter’s view of the world at that particular moment-in-time.

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The team might have been winning, you idolised some of the players and their style of play, or something less deep and meaningful such as liking the colour of the club jersey.

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Many of us might not even remember why we chose the team in the first place, particularly when we became so attached at a young and impressionable age (in my case, I was eight years old).

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But none of these reasons are the foundation for lifetime commitment, until death do us part, and all that.

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Players who we worshipped move on, coaches come and go and change the playing style as they pass through, and successful teams eventually stop winning. Over time, the bond which attached the fan to a particular club can sometimes wane.

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And then cracks start appearing in the relationship. We lose interest. We stop talking to one another. And when things are really on the rocks, we seek pleasure elsewhere, playing ‘away’ games and lusting after other teams.

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So, I think my betrayal is, in some large way, down to the fact that I never really had a strong connection with the team I choose as an eight-year-old. I never lived where the team was based, there was no family connection or tradition attached to the team, and now that I think about it, I don’t even know why I started supporting them.

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Perhaps my sole criteria back in those days was to support a team that my competitive sister and four brothers did not!

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Hey, call me superficial, if you like, but when you’re a kid in a sports-mad home, you need, and want, to have a team to support. It often defined us as individuals.

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But while sports fandom is a rite of passage in our formative years, maybe we can still be a mad-keen sports fan as we grow older without feeling obliged to say we support one particular team. 

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A more mellow view of the world and a changing perspective on what is important might allow us to simply sit back and marvel at sport, and the individual feats of athletes, through something other than the one-eyed spectacles we grew-up with.

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I will admit to being a big fan of the way Geelong has played over the past decade. Their brand of football was skilful, fast and a pleasure to watch. And like many, I have been happy to nod to the ‘unfashionable’ Swans’ premiership success.

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Of course, not having a team to support means you miss out on the highs and lows, the agony and the ecstasy, of being a team supporter.

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But although I don’t have an allegiance, I still can have a vested interest in the result of a match. And I still can enjoy a game of AFL, even if my weekend won’t be made, or ruined, by whichever teams win.

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Even better than that, I can now stop pretending. The relationship is over, she has moved out and taken her premierships with her, but I would like to think that it was all quite amicable in the end.