It’s that time again, that time that comes around every few years, when I’m supposed to care about football. The World Cup.
I do not care about football. I would go so far as to say that I actively despise football. There was a brief moment in my childhood where I sort of liked it — I played for my Cub Scout pack team, who were legendarily awful (worst result, 20-0 to them; best result, 1-1) and I used to talk about playing football with my erstwhile penpal Joanna (a former classmate who moved away and, unusually for the late ’80s, a girl who liked football) — but once I got to secondary school and we started to be obliged to play football in P.E. lessons, my hatred of it started to grow.
And it is hatred. Irrational, burning hatred. I’m not quite sure of the exact source of my irrational, burning hatred for “the beautiful game”, but it sure is there, and despite several attempts over the years to overcome said irrational, burning hatred I just cannot get over it at all. I hate football. I hate everything about it.
Perhaps it was the fact that football lessons in school were an opportunity for the “cool” kids to shine and be praised, whereas it made me feel utterly useless. Whereas — and I don’t wish to sound like I’m blowing my own trumpet here, but I’m aware I sort of am — I was fairly academically gifted compared to my peers at my secondary school, I was not at all gifted in any way when it came to any form of physical activity. Clumsiness and inaccuracy — a hangover from my childhood, where I had such difficulty with a number of things I had to have various forms of therapy and support to get over it — meant that I was a hindrance to any team I ended up on, which meant I was pretty much always the proverbial (and indeed literal) last one to get picked for teams. It was humiliating.
Or perhaps it’s the fact that when I’m around hardcore football fans — the ones who drink beer by the gallon, shout at the TV and raise the roof of whatever drinking establishment they’re frequenting any time something either good or bad happens on the pitch — I feel physically threatened. Nothing has ever actually happened to me — largely because I try and keep myself out of such situations as much as possible — but whenever I’m anywhere near a group of rowdy football fans I feel worried for my own safety. I even feel worried and scared when I hear, from my own home, drunkards staggering back from the pub late at night, singing football songs as they pass by.
Or perhaps it’s just because I resent being obliged to show an interest in something that I despise so. It’s assumed by almost everyone that you’ll be following the World Cup — it was even an informal question at a job interview I had last week (though to the asker’s credit, she did then joke that “the job is yours!” after I said that I don’t really like football; sadly, I don’t think she meant it) — and if you say that you’re not following it, or that you’re not interested, or that you think anyone who doesn’t put a comma in the statement “Come on, England!” is a barely-literate idiot (okay, perhaps that last one is a tad inflammatory, but it’s not wrong, is it?) you get a funny look of confusion at best, disgust at worst.
Either way, fuck the World Cup. I haven’t been following it at all — aside from the unavoidable, endless posts on social media during a match (I usually go and do something else at this point) — but if I understand correctly, the England team (I refuse to say “we”) is at risk of being knocked out shortly, at which point I will breathe a sigh of relief.
Why? Because there are very few things out there that make me feel more like an outsider than the inevitable national hysteria over the national team’s performance. I hate it. I despise it. And now I’m going to go and do something else to forget about it.
