Last Saturday, while out for drinks with my friends, I announced that I was winding down for the night. “Sorry guys,” I said apologetically. “I have to be up in time to go to the football.” It’s a sentence that, if you’d told me two years ago would have come out of my mouth, the only explanation I’d have is that it was a cry for help from some kind of Stepford Wives cult.
In fact, until a couple of years ago, I had never even stepped foot inside a football stadium. My aversion to the sport started off as genuine ignorance — since neither of my parents are from London, we didn’t grow up supporting a local team, and I generally wasn’t exposed to the sport as a child. But increasingly it became a choice — each time I tried to dip my toe in, I found I couldn’t stomach the toxic culture of machismo, racist bigotry and violence that seemed inextricable from the men’s game. (Plus, it did develop into a petty way to rile up patronising men: “no, I have no idea how the offside rule works and I don’t want you to explain it to me, because I do not care”).
