Not long ago I had an instructive conversation with a football-mad 10-year-old from Belfast. We were walking by a beautiful lake in Donegal. I’d seen him proudly wearing a Liverpool kit on the dancefloor at our Liverpool-mad friend’s wedding the previous day, so I asked him about the ongoing English league season. As everyone knows, football is “a common language”, particularly for people from different generations or cultural backgrounds who might otherwise struggle to know what to talk about together.
I asked him to name his favourite player (Mohamed Salah) and whether he thought Arsenal would be champions (he was certain they wouldn’t). He asked had I seen Cristiano Ronaldo’s latest goals? I confessed I had not. Ronaldo is smashing all the league records, he said, quoting the latest figures. Yeah, but it’s only the Saudi league, I interrupted. It’s not a proper league, is it? Who cares?
