This bridge is round

Football. Futebol. كرة القدم. Füssball. Soccer. Futbol. फ़ुटबॉल. Calcio

The beautiful game. 

With more followers around the world than adherents to any one religion, speakers of any one language or members of any one ethnicity, football is arguably the one truly global cultural practice. Cultural rites are infinitely varied, but the rules of the game of football are universal. The single greatest simultaneous human collective experience is the World Cup final every four years.

My football journey started as a 2 year old waddling behind an oversized beach ball as my grandfather mowed the lawn to the overwhelming backdrop of mating cicadas in the sweltering August heat. I never looked back. Many of my earliest and most visceral memories are inextricably linked to 22 players chasing a leather ball. The deafening sound of steel drums and the inescapable smell of marijuana as we walked up to the stadium through the throng of Jamaican fans for my first World Cup game in the summer of 1998. The sacred post match drive-through ritual where I’d share a box of chicken nuggets and a sprite with my Dad while recreating the key aspects of the game I’d just played with a small portion of fries on the table top. The three visits to an emergency room in the space of a week with my increasingly exasperated mother because I refused to stop playing on an already grotesquely swollen ankle. I was all in. All in on the mythology of the teams. All in on the stories of the players and their trademark moves. All in on how it felt to have the ball at my feet and be totally and utterly lost in that moment alone.

Cut to three decades later and my exasperated wife has replaced my mother in my somewhat less frequent visits to the emergency room but not much else has changed. Over the years, those thousands of hours of playing, watching and debating every aspect of the game have come at the expense of a cruciate ligament, elevated cortisol levels every weekend and the small fortune invested in watching teams play all around the world in stadiums from Sao Paulo to New Jersey to Istanbul. 

So is it all really worth it you ask? What’s the return on investment on all of that time? Why do I still know how many career goals Raul Gonzalez has scored? (it’s 323 btw) Why does every news algorithm push me articles on how 16yr old future star of my team’s academy did at the weekend. Why do I invariable click on them when they do? With three young kids, I’m more time poor now than I’ve ever been. Is prioritising my 5-a-side games in the few free hours I have a week really the best use of my time?

All good questions. The answer to all of them is yes. 

Yes, because of the incredible memories. Yes, because of the mind and body benefits of playing the game. Yes, because after 36 years all of that knowledge has compounded in a way that is inextricably linked to so many aspects of my life. But mainly, yes, because the real ROI on all that time isn’t about the magic moments on the pitch but all of the serendipitous human alchemy off of it. It’s not about the game of football but the powerful connection to other humans that it provides. 

The serendipitous conversation on a ferry in Brazil with a Santos fan who went on to show us the best places to surf on the island. The debate on the prospects for an upcoming London derby in a job interview with a future boss. Taking practice penalties as a way to get a group of 12 year olds in rural Kenya to try a new reading app. Time and time again I’ve experienced football to be one of the most universal bridges between human beings. 

“The ball is round, the game lasts ninety minutes, and everything else is just theory.” - Sepp Herberger

This quote holds just as true for the 22 players chasing the ball as for the other 8bn of us watching them do it. Football is a great equalizer. Rich or poor. Liberal or conservative. Cristiano or Messi? None of these matter when you’re on the pitch. Everyone’s opinion is worth exactly the same when you’re off it. But during the biggest games, each of us remembers where we watched them. Who we were with. And even who we were at that time. The beautiful game anchors us to time and space and those anchors are bridges to everyone else who shares them.

Returning to football-mad England after 8 years has been a timely reminder of football’s unifying power. A talented young team that truly reflected the diversity of the country took England all the way to the final and all 50 million English fans with them on that journey. From the letter to to the nation penned by England’s manager before the tournament, to strangers coming together to join in chants of “its coming home” on every street corner, to the way the country (bar a small group of reprehensible keyboard warriors) rallied around the three young players who missed key penalties in the final. For 30 odd days the country came together in a way that momentarily set aside the bitterly divisive consequences of a Brexit vote that split the nation down the middle a few years earlier. One collective identity overriding 50m unique and often conflicting ones for 90 minutes at a time. 

My return to London also allowed me to re-kindle my long suffering love affair with Tottenham Hotspur. Inheriting my brother’s season ticket means I get to spend 90 minutes every few weeks sitting between Ola (who travels from Sweden for every game) and Dave (who’s been walking a mile up the same road to watch Spurs play for the last 40 years). Three completely different worlds coming together to watch white shirts chase a ball from 60 rows up in the air on a big patch of grass in north London. No other single aspect of our lives intersects but for those 90 minutes we are in total communion. We celebrate the wins and lament the losses but in those moments in between when we learn about Dave’s granddaughters school struggles or Ola’s new business plan we get that a little bit closer as human beings. 

Some of the strongest bonds we form are when we feel a shared sense of identity with those around us. Often you just need a little bridge to get there.  

I’ve found that the small round variety tends to do the trick.