Football Fandom & Theseus’s Paradox

What do football fans support if the players keep changing? — and not just the players, there’s the management, the coaches, the ownership…

After the recent sacking of Eric Ten Hag, Frank Lampard (in the clip below) said that ‘nobody knows what Man United are anymore’, and that is certainly true, there is an identity crisis at Old Trafford, but the same could be said of any club. What exactly is it we support when all the pieces keep getting re-arranged?

This question is like the Ship of Theseus thought experiment; if the pieces of a ship are replaced as they decay, at what point is it an entirely different ship?

As with this paradox, I am yet to hear a convincing argument one way or the other; so I invite the reader to try…