Why the beautiful game is still beautiful

Almost 30 years after I saw my first live match, I probably ought to have got over my love of football. It just hasn’t happened though. All through my life the "beautiful game" has been there, in the foreground as much as the background. I vividly remember the excitement of Friday afternoon shopping at the Co-op because it meant more cut-out cards for the 1982 World Cup album, and shortly after that Panini stickers entered my life. Then I became an avid reader of Shoot! magazine. When I wasn’t fortunate enough to go to a match, Saturday afternoon was about “guess the goals” competitions and score updates on local radio.


Pre-puberty I didn’t have an imaginary friend, I had an entire imaginary football league complete with hand-drawn squad posters, a carefully-typed magazine whose pictures were traced from real-life action shots; and an Amstrad Basic computer program for calculating results. I dripped on my exercise books after sweaty kickarounds in the junior-school playground. I also played occasionally and haplessly in goal for school teams until the move to 8’ goalposts added a decisive lack of height to my long list of weaknesses. As a teenager I spent hours on coaches visiting a few thousand grass-and-concrete square yards of England’s less impressive provincial towns and accumulated books full of notes, lineups and match reports from games I saw live or on TV. I collected probably hundreds of matchday programmes and eventually (briefly) had a job producing one. Many mementos have been discarded over the years but a pictorial record of the Mexico World Cup remains one of my favourite books, alongside a history of Gillingham FC which is worth more than ten times what I paid for it.


I still find myself distracted by under-10s matches when I’m supposed to be supervising my sons in the park and if there’s a game on TV I’ll watch it, even Spurs’ C team in the Europa League. It’s crazy. Everyone knows that football is rotten pretty much from top to bottom. This isn’t new, just more prominent than before. FIFA executives have been taking backhanders (allegedly) for decades. In the '80s stadia were decrepit, full of thugs in and out of police uniform. Now they are more family-friendly, if families aren’t priced out. Cynical fouls, fixed matches, robotic referees, trigger-happy chairmen and ranting autocratic owners were ever thus; even the oligarchic Premier League and its TV-controlled scheduling is now old hat. On top of that we have inarticulate, respectless, mercenary millionaires shagging and swearing their way from the back to the front pages. And raving, win-at-any-cost parents standing on the Sunday-morning touchlines aspiring for their sons to follow in their tabloided footsteps – the millionaire part at least. And inane barracking from the stands. (Mercifully racism has been banished but wit also seems to have gone; I hope that’s a coincidence.) But every now and again something happens in football to warm the soul – and I’m not thinking only about Gillingham’s three victories in seven-goal thrillers this season.


Two weeks ago the Doncaster Rovers striker Billy Sharp lost his two-day-old son Louis. After missing one game, he wanted to play against Middlesbrough, was made captain and scored early in the game with a brilliant volley. At that point he revealed a T-shirt tribute to his son. Normally that would have brought him a booking but the referee overlooked it. Either he was human or, more likely, with tears in his eyes he couldn’t find his pencil. Last Saturday Sharp played away at Ipswich, who twice tried to sign him in the summer. He scored again to give Doncaster a 2-0 lead and wreck the home fans’ hopes of winning a crucial game. Yet those same fans’ response was not abuse, but an immediate standing ovation for Sharp as he celebrated the goal. And that moment when thousands engage spontaneously in appreciation of something more important than the result, is why I still love football.