Introducing... Rome Wasn't Built in a Day

About ten months ago, something happened which changed my life, and not in a way that I wanted. This turned out to be one of the results of it all, and it's time to release it into the wild.

Introduction

It hurts, to lose your job.

Especially when you’re 50 years old, and you know that the scrapheap is the most typical place of employment for people of your age.

Especially when you really love what you do.

Especially when, after years of working towards it and having just about overcome the imposter syndrome that all kids from my sort of background feel.

And especially when you’re responsible for children, and you’re on your own.

In the weeks after it was confirmed that I was surplus to requirements, I bashed out a book, or, if you’d prefer to frame it another way, the longest blog post ever written.

I was told that it was nothing to do with the quality of my output, and this is just how the modern media works. I’d been nominated the previous November for a fairly prestigious award, and had written about how I felt vindicated by what I felt had been a life-altering stroke of good fortune which, you might say contradictorily, I had worked extremely hard for. All that work—I never phoned anything in—and it wasn’t enough.

In the days after I was informed of my impending redundancy, I felt as though all of that had been a waste of time, as though I’d made a fool of myself for having the temerity to believe that it could happen to me, and all the more so for having expressed so many of those feelings publicly. Wearing your heart on your sleeve comes at a cost.

The support of others kept me going, and rather than resigning myself to a fate of wasting away and scratching a living until retirement or death’s sweet kiss—and given my lack of pension provision and the stress I was under, the latter felt considerably more likely than the former—all the time keeping in the back of my mind that I had these moments in the sun, but somehow found a way to blow it.

And I was consumed by guilt over the way that I felt over this, that this was a ‘first world problem’, that if I deserved all of this, my feelings weren’t valid, that I was being selfish, even though my very first feeling had been fear, precisely because this wasn’t just about me any more, because I was responsible for two kids, neither of whom deserved to see their father almost falling apart in front of them. In that sort of circular doom-loop, it’s perfectly possible for these two (on the surface contradictory) emotions to exist concurrently.

But I’m still here. Ten months on, I’ve recovered, got my purpose back. My life isn’t exactly as I’d want it. We live on the breadline. Debts continue to mount. No-one stepped in to offer me a second opportunity with a greater degree of security than freelancing, because that doesn’t happen in the media in the 21st century. Instead, I’ve gone it alone and, slowly, things are starting to get better. It remains the case that everything could yet topple over sideways and subsume me again, perhaps more permanently, but I live very much in the present, nowadays. When you can’t plan for any sort of future, you kind of have to.

I hammered out this ‘book’ in about six weeks. I had something to prove to myself, that I wasn’t quite ready for the scrapheap yet, that I wasn’t quite ready to become even more of an irrelevance than I already, quite suddenly and completely unexpectedly, considered myself to be. Not yet. I hammered at the keyboard over that time, a flurry of blurred hands, determined that if I was going to scream into some sort of void, I was at least going to do so in some sort of constructive way.

(For the record, I don’t say any of this as an attempt to make anyone feel guilty about anything. It’s just the truth. A completely honest perception of what happened that time. Truth is, it’s only really now that I’m sufficiently removed from it to be able to really talk about it publicly.)

This is the result.

Rome Wasn’t Built In a Day: A Story of Football in England.

This was never intended to be anything like a definitive history of football in England. To do that intricate story full justice would take considerably more than I had to offer at that time. Neither was it ever intended as anything like an academic tome. I’m no great historian. This is, if anything, a love story. It’s my take. It’s the version of this history that has grown inside my head since I first fell in love with the game, something like 43 years ago. There’s no foreword, no front cover, and it hasn’t been subbed. It’s rough and ready, and I hope it wears its heart on its sleeve, just as I do.

It comes in 26 chapters; 18 on the story of the club game in England, interwoven with a further eight on the England national team. It’s a story of class, because there isn’t anything about England that can’t be related to that subject in some way or other. It’s about glory and tragedy, and about how football acts as a blank slate, reflecting the contemporary world in which it exists.

At any point in the last 160 years, football has been a cultural phenomenon onto which we have projected more about our society than we would ever publicly express. It’s just that we don’t really notice that we’re doing so at the time. It’s about the best of us and the worst of us, from the institutions that are supposed to protect both the game itself.

More than anything else, it’s about the fans themselves, even if not explicitly. It’s been said before that football has moved through different eras as the decades have progressed. The era of the administrator. The era of the great manager. The era of the player. The era of the owner.

Throughout all of this, the fans have been a permanent fixture. From the moment that teams started to mark out pitches, people started turning up to watch them play. And those people developed a type of love that hadn’t really existed before, for institutions, for colours, for badges, for bricks and mortar. For all the water that’s passed under the bridge since then, we’ve been the closest thing to a constant.

When people say “football without fans is nothing”, it’s meant almost esoterically. Fans give the game its clearest context. Those who complain about it being “22 people kicking a ball around” are missing that fundamental truth. It matters because it matters. Without those fans, it would indeed be “22 people kicking a ball around”. But those fans are still there. They always will be. And because of that, football will always be more than that glib dismissal.

But that’s not all. It’s about the people who have built this game, from the crucible of the industrial revolution to the nation states of the 21st century. It’s about the players, the managers, the administrators and the broadcasters. It’s about shifting priorities and the way in which the world has changed since the middle of the 19th century. And it’s a story, not the story. There will be omissions. There will be biases. It’s probably imperfect and that’s fine, because it comes from a place of love.

So I present this to you as, I hope, something of a rough diamond. It will be available to paid subscribers every Thursday evening for the next 26 weeks. On top of the other material that is available to paying subscribers throughout the week, I hope that it makes a compelling case to become a paid subscriber.

Do I have thanks? Of course I do. To Ed and Natalie, to Dylan and Dorian, and to some of you reading this, many of whom I’ve never even met. If you’re reading this and thinking, “Might he be talking about me?”, I almost certainly am. But more than anyone else, I have thanks to mum, who never saw me get to live an incredible dream, but who never—as she most definitely would—had to suffer through what happened afterwards either, to dad, for being a role model in a way in which I don’t think he even really understands, especially when I was too embarrassed to admit that I needed it, and to Caroline, my big sister.

As ever, if you would like to be a paid subscriber but cannot afford to pay, please contact me; the best way to do so is by Twitter Direct Message. There’ll be no judgement on my part. I’ve stared poverty full in the face, and to an extent am still doing so. I know how it feels. If you already are a paid subscriber, thank you for your ongoing support. You needn’t do anything. It’ll drop into your inbox every Thursday, starting from Thursday, the 22nd February.

Perhaps, in half a year’s time or longer, I’ll put it all together into one place and self-publish it. I certainly didn’t have the confidence to send it to a publisher last year, and I’m not certain that I do now. But I do have the confidence to send it to you, and I do have the confidence to say that you should pay for it, because professional writers should be paid.

And that’s something. It’s certainly more than I had ten months ago.