Falling out of love with the beautiful game
My life with football has certainly been a game of two halves.
Hello all,
So I have decided to start a Substack to write about a niche corner of the football fandom market. Those that have, perhaps, found themselves disenchanted by ‘the beautiful game’ recently.
‘The beautiful game’ is one of those phrases synonymous with football, or soccer, as it is known to some.
Another popular, and perhaps cliched saying, firmly entrenched in footballing vernacular is ‘a game of two halves’.
The general meaning is that a game can seemingly be going one way for the first 45 minutes and suddenly swing the other the next.
Think Tottenham Hotspur v Manchester City in their 2004 FA Cup Fourth Round replay.
Jon Macken demonstrating the meaning of ‘a game of two halves’. Facebook. Manchester City.
Cruising at 3-0 and with Joey Barton picking up a perfectly in character red card at half-time, Spurs appeared to have their ticket to the Fifth Round punched.
However, a pre-takeover City roared back in the second half, with Jon Macken scoring the heroic 90th-minute winner.
The ‘two halves’ adage is also an apt description of my own relationship with football.
Since I was six-years-old and Paul Rideout scored the winning goal in the 1995 FA Cup Final for Everton I have been football obsessed.
I wanted to be a footballer, then I wanted to be a football coach and finally, given my skillset, I decided I wanted to write about football.
And I did.
In 2012, following a period of upheaval in my life, I started a blog about sport. Similarly to this, it was for my own practice and personal sense of achievement.
Remarkably, it did alright, and I soon found myself writing about football and getting paid to do so. I quit my job at a woman’s clothes shop and became a full-time football writer.
At the time, the plaudits were endless and the appreciation shown of my position by those closest to me warmed my heart.
I had secured, what I always believed to be, my dream job. For a while, it was. From the age of six to about 26 I felt like Tottenham did in that first half from 2004. Football formed my identity, developed my friendships, it paid my bills.
Then, something started to change, the intricacies of which I will no doubt get into as I continue writing this newsletter on a fortnightly/weekly basis.
For the past six years, I have felt like Tottenham in that second half. Struggling to keep up with a young Shaun Wright-Phillips and regularly thwarted by Arni Arnason as the game slips away from me.
So I want to write about it, all the things about football that have steadily been eroding my once unbridled and unwavering commitment and passion for the game.
That is not to say I still don’t adore it. I hope to touch on that as well, the things I have discovered keep me entangled in this global game’s far-reaching net.
Because, as with anything you begin to loathe, hate or resent, like an ex-partner or a family member, the strength of that feeling actually comes from a place of love.
I love football, which makes the parts of it I hate all the more forceful.
As well as writing about the uglier aspects of football I am hoping to write about my personal relationship with the game, do some interesting self-commissioned journalistic pieces, talk to some like-minded individuals from the online football world and maybe put together the odd XI here or there, for fun.
All in all, I am just looking forward to writing about football in the voice I have always wanted. If three people read it and enjoy it, or 300, I will appreciate it all the same.
So, feel free to sign up for my Substack, follow me on Twitter, and share with me some of your thoughts and ideas on what I should write about or even confide in me your own personal football foibles (shit, I should have called this Football Foibles).
So there it is. Three peeps on the whistle and full-time arrives.
I hope anyone who does read or engage with this newsletter enjoys it in some way. I know I will enjoy writing it.
Thanks for reading.