What if they never get the bug?

By the time I was eight years old I was getting immersed into football's weird parallel universe, but while my older kid is now that age, I'm unbothered whether he obsesses to the same extent.

Because I am a 51 year-old, I spend probably more time than is good for me thinking about those brief few years when I was a child. By the age of six or seven, I was pretty much hostile to the very idea of football. Watching on from the sidelines of the playground of the Bush Hill Park junior school in Enfield it looked brutish, and given the propensity of kids that age to kick the shins of their opponents rather than the ball, whether deliberately or accidentally, it kinda was.

But then something clicked. I don’t remember the specifics of what triggered it. All I remember is this feeling scales falling from my eyes, a lightbulb moment when those numbers in the columns on the league tables in dad’s newspaper started to make sense for the first time, when that game, which had previously looked like a bunch of people kicking a ball around for no easily discernible reason, suddenly started to make sense.

There were bumps along the road. I remember radio reports coming through of a home draw for Spurs against Everton in about 1981 while we played in the park one Saturday afternoon to which my very first reactive thought was, “Well, why didn’t they just… win the game?”, a level of perplexion and affrontment with which a good number of us remain just as familiar when our team fails to win to this very day. As late as the 1982 FA Cup Final, I was baffled as to why both QPR and Spurs were both wearing their change kits for the same match. Football is full of these tiny little quasi-inconsistencies, and if you’re the sort of 8 year-old that I was, they’re an open invitation to just dive deeper and deeper in.

By the time I was eight, I was essentially all in, playing football for the cub scouts on a Saturday morning while wearing a football shirt with collars that could have doubled for the wings of Concorde, and increasingly finding ways of being able to watch The Big Match or Match of the Week on a Saturday night and then Match of the Day on a Sunday afternoon (and then getting confused when they switched places the following season).

Well, now I’m the father and the elder of my two kids has already passed the threshold point at which the game that would come to dominate his father’s life. And neither he nor his younger brother have shown any discernible interest in the game. I’ve written on these pages before about the pleasure of going to a football match with my kids, of spending time with them when I know that they simply won’t be this age forever, and that they won't be so amenable to spending time with their old man forever, either. The time passes quickly, all the more so when you’re an older dad, as I am.

But I know the score. The amount of time that they actually spend watching matches is so close to be nothing as to be unappreciable. The first time that my older kid and I went to a match at Worthing together, he burst into an incredible, joyous smile when Worthing scored their first goal because he thought for a few moments that the crowd were cheering him.

And over the years, there’s been no curiosity on either of their parts to explore this world that I live on the fringes of any more closely. It’s daddy’s job. Putting together 1,000 words on the subject of a glorious, transcendentally beautiful moment during a match? Might as well be filling out a spreadsheet or welding two pieces of metal together, as far as they’re concerned. Indeed if anything, they’d probably be more interested if I was doing something with a blowtorch, and in all honesty I can’t say I’d blame them.

Practicalities do get in the way of this somewhat, in our particular case. They’re at their mother’s every Saturday and Sunday, while Tuesday night matches from which we wouldn’t get home until gone 10.00pm at the earliest are out, at the very least on school nights. But this is hardly a football-free house. Of the five nights a week they’re here, there’ll normally be a match on the TV when they get home on the Sunday afternoon, then one on… okay, it’s possible that there might be one on each of the following four nights, too. But there’s never skulduggery on their part to stay up later, none of the curiosity that they show towards, say, Minecraft, rocks and stones, or very large numbers.

And the realisation has started to dawn upon me… do they just consider going to football with me as Bring Your Kid to Work day? When I was a kid, my dad was a scrap metal dealer, and every once in a while during the summer holidays I would go out with him, touring the scrap metal dealers of Birmingham and the Black Country as he did his buying and selling patter. On one occasion, he drove into Birmingham and we had chips on the grandiose steps outside Villa Park.

I loved those days out. I wish I could experience one of those just one more time. But it was still dad doing dad things, and there’s little to dispel me of the notion that this is how my kids already perceive football. Their mother will be of little assistance. After all, this is the woman who, during the 2014 World Cup, looked at a breakdown of the groups and asked why Manchester United, Real Madrid and Barcelona weren’t taking part, a question which reflected an absolute lack of interest in the game which hasn’t changed at all over the intervening nine years (this wasn’t the reason for the split, for those of you who may be wondering).

That doesn’t bug me, either. To the best of my knowledge, my own mum only ever attended one football match, the 1982 FA Trophy final between Enfield and Altrincham, because she’d somewhat blithely promised my dad earlier in the season that, yeah, sure she’d go if Enfield got to Wembley. It had been a decade since their previous trip there. She liked those odds, but the bet didn’t go her way. It was the only time that all four of us went to a football match. As such, that day remains among my most precious childhood memories, even if mum didn’t really want to be there.

What does bug me is that as time moves inexorably forward, I am largely unconcerned whether my kids never express any interest in the game whatsoever or not. What life lessons could they possibly take from it all? Albert Camus’s comments about the morality and obligations of men remain true, to some extent. But… this product? Run by these people? Advertising that? With social media like that? I’ve got enough on my plate without half-wondering what sort of slurs my two might be sending to a manager whose team has just committed the cardinal sin of having lost two matches in a row, in a few years’ time. Why on earth would I even want them getting immersed in this world?

Playing could be an outlet. They do love running around in the park, after all. But then, do I want them going into kids or youth football, with its constantly swirling talk of pushy parenting and rampant over-competitiveness? Any youth coaches reading this may well grimace at someone saying that, but the extent to which the horror stories that you read about are even true or not is almost beyond the point. The perception is at least part of the problem.

Because perhaps the point is that if you can’t persuade a football writer, who’s done a little of quite of lot things in the game over the years, who’s been pretty much fully immersed in it for much of the last four decades, and who does still hold that candle, however dim it may feel at times, that they should get their kids immersed in a similar way that I did, what chance do you have with parents who are more ambivalent about football? And what does that do to the number of people playing the game or watching it in a decade or two’s time, in a culture in which there is a rapidly expanding number of ways in which a kid can spend a Saturday afternnoon, Sunday morning or Tuesday night? It hardly seems likely to increase future participation, if you can’t persuade someone who’s been an advocate for this stupid game for this long that his kids should do the same.