There’s nothing like the start of a new football season. Blank pages waiting to be filled with the next chapter of history. Fresh turf ready to be studded and scuffed. Marquee signings primed to strut their stuff. If you’re not a fan of the beautiful game but you have a loved one who is, you might be dreading the next nine months, as once again football becomes your Saturday scourge. But for millions if not billions of supporters around the world, this weekend means normal service is resumed. And it’s more than that too. Even more than New Year’s Day, this is the most optimistic time of the whole year: when the hope-batteries have been recharged and anything feels possible. Like Leicester City in 2016, could the dream come true? The promise of a new season is sporting alchemy.
Speaking personally, I couldn’t live without it. In June 2015, my big brother Dan suddenly died. He was 43 and had been living with obesity, diabetes and neurodiversity (the latter pair undiagnosed), but he was thought to be in no imminent danger. Then he passed away and my life changed forever. He was a keystone in my Jenga tower and without him I could feel my whole edifice teeter. What saved me was the shared passion that united us: our love of sport. You name it: World’s Strongest Man, Junior Kick Start, the field gun competition at the Royal Tournament, we’d lap it all up. But football was his ultimate passion, and Crystal Palace FC was his club. As a result I inherited his Palace season ticket. I know what I’d have told him if he could hear me: that was a fate worse than death. (I’m a Spurs fan, for my sins.) I’d never imagined paying 19 trips to Selhurst Park in a year to watch the Eagles, let alone without Dan, but I couldn’t give up his seat. This was his prized possession, his Golden Fleece, his precious. So like a sporting version of Withnail and I, I became a Crystal Palace supporter by mistake. And the effect was extraordinary.
Just when I needed it most, sport provided a scaffold from which to rebuild my life. The 2015/16 season, like Ronan Keating’s life, was a rollercoaster, sending Palace soaring towards the top four before nose-diving into a relegation battle and then rising again to an FA Cup Final against Manchester United, which they lost and which is most remembered for Alan Pardew’s epic dad-dancing. But the results were secondary. They were eclipsed by the sheer invigoration of throwing myself into the comforting thrill of sport. Yes, ultimately it’s an unimportant thing, but Stephen Fry was right to call it ‘the most important unimportant thing in the world’.
Each sporting season is a wave lapping on the shore, gently rubbing away at what lay there before and replacing it. Renewing it. Having kept up Dan’s 26-season Selhurst streak, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Should I make it 27? Or 28? Was it a life sentence? In the end I realised this would be living Dan’s life, not mine. So instead I decided to bottle the lightning of sport in a different way, going to as many great events as I could in the space of a single year. From Wimbledon tennis to Wimbledon greyhounds, from rugby to Rubik’s Cubes, I went to the lot, creating the ultimate season ticket in Dan’s memory. The journey is chronicled in my new book, A Fan For All Seasons, which has just been published to chime with this wonderful time of year.
Sport is one of our greatest inventions. It’s war without death. Drama without scripts. Fun without end
At every ground across the land this Saturday there will be gaps, where fans who should be there are absent, having not made it to this year’s big kick-off. But there will be new faces too, bewitched for the first time by the special mix of hope, comfort and joy that only sport can conjure, especially on this magical weekend. And not just in the Premier League. The football world is getting larger all the time, and the Women’s World Cup is providing equally fantastic entertainment. Should the Lionesses add the golden trophy to their historic Euros success last year, there’s nothing Guardiola’s Manchester City could do to top it. And just as importantly, it’s not only at the top level that the promise of a new season weaves its peculiar spell on so many of us: there’s just as much delight to be had by following any club at any level of the football pyramid.
The fact is, sport is one of our greatest inventions. It’s war without death. Drama without scripts. Fun without end. Whoever you support, your club is by far the greatest team the world has ever seen.
Have a great season.
