This is a confession. Not about tactical systems, not about the transfer budget and not about why our striker permanently forgets where the goal is. This is a text about us, you and me. About people who voluntarily gave ten months of their lives and a heap of nerve cells to this country's main soap opera - the Russian Premier League.

Thirty rounds are behind us. The tables are fixed, the results are in. Time to admit honestly what kind of monster regularly watching our football turns a person into.

Chronicles of football masochism

Let's be frank: supporting a club outside the RPL's top five is a special, refined form of mental sadomasochism.

Every July you open the fixture list for round one with bright, almost childlike thoughts: "Well, this season we'll definitely show attacking, dominant football. The lads have gelled, pre-season went brilliantly, the new signings are class." You look like a fresh, hopeful first-year student.

May arrives. Rostec Arena, a Baltic draught, and on the pitch good old football in the style of "hoof it forward, the game will come". You no longer even remember dominance and lacework football; hope has gone. There's a scrap on. The stadium is boiling. In seconds like these the brain switches off civilisation and reverts to factory settings. The scariest thing is the moment you surface from a light trance and realise that for the past minute and a half, on pure autopilot, half the stadium has been telling the linesman everything it thinks about his sexual orientation, and you're among them... And yet you're a cultured, well-brought-up person, and words like that are frightening even to say in ordinary life...

Over these 30 matches I understood that my hope doesn't just die last. It regenerates like Deadpool. It finally expires on Saturday at 19:45 after the stupidest goal conceded in the 92nd minute, and on Sunday morning it's reborn with the thought: "Well, next round against Akron at home we'll definitely take three points." We won't

Stadium physiology versus common sense

I also understood that inside me lives an utterly primitive, superstitious savage from the Stone Age. In ordinary life I'm a reasonable person with a university degree, but the moment the broadcast comes on, logic leaves the chat. It's replaced by the firm conviction that the result of the match depends directly on the intensity of my personal discomfort.

Fancy a drink, but you'd have to go to the kitchen? No movement while the ball's in play. You sit there with a parched throat, staring at an empty glass, thinking: "No, mate, if you go now our lot will definitely ship one. Hold on. For the greater good; you can go at half-time." You are literally regulating the team's level of play with the degree of your own dehydration.

But the real hell, of course, is physiology. The pelvic organs versus the Russian Premier League.

When in the 75th minute you acutely, unbearably need a wee, a Shakespearean drama unfolds in your head. You stand in front of the television and hold it until the final whistle. You switch on total self-control mode, because inside sits a reinforced-concrete certainty: the moment you cross the threshold of the toilet and close the door, the magic will break. The opponent will equalise instantly.

And the most terrible thing about all this is that it genuinely works! Sod's law in the RPL is harsh and inescapable. Once a season you cravenly give in. You think: "Come on, I'm a civilised person, how can my bladder affect the game?!" You run to the toilet, do everything at the speed of a professional Formula 1 pit stop - three seconds. You come back and the scoreboard already says 1:1. And the broadcast is showing the replay, where the ball trickles miserably into the corner off our defender's knee.

At that moment it hits you. You stand in front of the television with an absolutely sincere, all-consuming sense of guilt. You want to cry. You look at your reflection and understand: it wasn't the holding midfielder who didn't track back. It wasn't the defender who lost his man at the far post. It wasn't even a stroke of tactical genius by the other coach. It was you. You personally gifted that goal. You let down the team, the city and fifteen thousand people in the stands simply because you turned out to be a weak-willed weakling who couldn't hold on for fifteen minutes. You realise football has finally broken your brain, but there's nothing to be done - you flush and go back to finish watching this nightmare.

RPL geopolitics and the "supporting against" syndrome

Another side effect of thirty rounds is that your ability simply to enjoy football atrophies completely. You turn into a toxic hater for whom a defeat for your neighbour in the table brings more endorphins than a bonus at work.

It's impossible to be kind in the RPL. In the second half of the season you start watching matches involving teams you don't support. You sit in front of the screen on a Sunday evening and sincerely wish sporting failure on eleven strangers in, say, green shirts.

You catch yourself having utterly sinful thoughts. You applaud when their left winger picks up a fourth yellow and misses the next round (preferably against us). You watch refereeing outrages in a rival's match, and instead of righteous anger you think: "Give them another penalty, some bent ref gave us the same rubbish against them." Our football drags out the darkest, angriest and most vengeful corners of the soul, but you look at the table after the round, see that the rivals dropped points, and smile like a perfectly happy man.

Stages of acceptance

The home front has also been through tectonic shifts in these 10 months. The family has finally resigned itself. The question "Maybe we could go for a walk on Saturday?" vanished without trace from the vocabulary somewhere around October. It was replaced by a sympathetic: "Fine, go and watch your rubbish, just don't shout too loud when our lot concede again."

At some point you realise your loved ones aren't rooting for the team. They're rooting for you, trying to survive this season and stay sane.

30 matches are behind us. The liver begs for mercy, the nervous system has gone out the window, the vocal cords are shot. But if you ask me right now: "Are we watching next season?" - I'll answer "yes" without a second thought and go and refresh the page with next season's season tickets. And it's still a month and a half away, the horror!

The RPL is our circus. And I wouldn't miss its next tour for anything.