MIDNIGHT MASS

Finding football in every waking moment – and some sleeping ones

By TOM SCHMITTER

Backpack slung over my shoulder, packed with enough fluids and a hideously orange football. Two metres ahead of me, the sheepdog pulling at the leash with the same forward thrust Cafu used to have bombing down the right flank at San Siro. I briefly wonder whether Cafu is actually underrated. He probably is. Full-backs generally are – unless you’re the kind of person who voluntarily watches Javier Zanetti highlight compilations or types “Philipp Lahm positioning masterclass” into YouTube at half past midnight. Those people exist. I’m one of them.

Five metres behind us, the three-year-old shuffling barefoot along the pond in an oversized Eintracht Frankfurt shirt. Suddenly he stops because some insect crosses his path. I stop too. Not because of a bug, but because of the grass beside it. That slightly burnt Dutch holiday park grass reminds me of Norwich City’s 2006 home shirt. Unpleasant yellow-green. Beautiful. My wife once told me normal people just see grass. Well.

We keep our eyes on the destination: the mini artificial pitch. The pitch itself is nothing special. A rectangle behind a few trees with aluminium goals. No spectators (except the dog). No stand or floodlights. And yet the place feels more important to me than some polished high-end arena. Maybe because nothing here is staged. No LED advertising boards. No VIP section. No man with a headset saying something horrible like “matchday experience”. Just a football pitch. There are places that desperately want to be stadiums. And there are places that are simply football.

The little one, with a head full of curls like Carlos Valderrama, shoots at the goal, more by accident. More like the swing of a very small and very drunk Sunday league striker. Still, I raise both arms and clench my fists. Probably the same way fathers have done for centuries. Except other fathers might think of the first step. I briefly wonder whether it’s problematic to associate important moments in your children’s lives with centre-forward highlights. The little one is still working on the basics, practising with both feet. Things like false nines, chance anticipation or the tactical movement of a central striker don’t seem to interest him yet. And so we focus instead on the romantic side of football this morning: father and son, good mood, sunshine, seagulls occasionally circling overhead, sweaty shirts (I’m wearing Milan Baros, number 15, Czech Republic, the white one). What more do you need? All of a sudden, I’m thinking about starting an Oceania football fanclub again.

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It’s absurd really, because I don’t actually have too much free time. But somewhere between preparing lunchboxes, kindergarten parent meetings, vet appointments and semi-functional Netflix evenings, I still somehow found time to think about Samoan shirt aesthetics and Vanuatu club crests. I love clubs like Bath City, CD Dénia or obscure Scandinavian teams with flagpoles and wooden clubhouses more than global super-clubs with font-optimised branding. I never wanted football presented to me. I wanted to discover it. And I still do, now as a man in his thirties. Like finding a Sampdoria sticker at an Italian bus stop. A weathered Portsmouth scarf in a harbour pub. My wife calls it “unnecessarily intense perception”. She means it affectionately, I think.

I never wanted football presented to me. I wanted to discover it. Like finding a Sampdoria sticker at an Italian bus stop

Back to the holiday. White wine and paprika crisps on the terrace. The little one is already asleep. Somewhere dishes clatter. The sea rustles. A teenager on a bike is wearing a PSG shirt with the Jordan logo. I wonder whether he knows Paris once had a wonderfully rough-edged identity before becoming a geopolitical marketing project.

Sometimes I honestly think football was more like a system of order. A way of organising the world. People, cities, memories, music, politics, summer holidays. Other people remember years of life because of relationships or jobs. I remember when Udinese still had Antonio Di Natale, which season Mikael Forssell played for Mönchengladbach, or when Míchel Salgado was at Blackburn.

The next morning I wake far too early. Family holidays with children mean somebody, somewhere, is always awake. Seagulls scream outside. The little one lies diagonally across the bed like a centre-back who’s been substituted in extra time with cramp. Insert your favourite centre-half mentally here. Mine would probably be BFG Mertesacker or Sol Campbell.

I go to get bread rolls. And right there it happens again. The woman standing in front ofme is wearing a tracksuit in the same colours Deportivo La Coruña wore in the early 2000s (and thankfully she doesn’t look like Roy Makaay). I can’t switch this off. Maybe I don’t even want to.

At some point the little one comes downstairs. Valderrama hair all over the place. Crumpled face. He sits beside me and bites into his bread roll. “Dad.” “Hmm?” “Why do you like so many clubs?” Good question. Normal people maybe have one club, two at most. Meanwhile I develop emotional attachments to Swedish coastal teams, Cypriot club names or Scottish third division sides simply because their stadium entrance looks Gothic. “Don’t know,” I say. “Just like them, I guess.” He nods as though I’ve said something perfectly reasonable and returns to a croissant and a Pettson and Findus book. Children accept strange adults for a surprisingly long time. My instinct is that this stops by puberty. Will he eventually come to terms with the fact that his balding father, wielding barbecue tongs in a stretched Pavel Nedved shirt over a beer belly, still attempts the Jay-Jay Okocha move – and fails miserably? So I remain loyal to my longing for football’s outer edges. Places where football still feels not entirely deciphered. Not fully measured and optimised yet. Places where a club crest is allowed to simply be beautiful. Without branding strategy or global target-group analysis.

In the evening I type more notes into my phone. Short story idea: German fan founds an Oceania supporters’ club. First meeting takes place in his own garage. I laugh. My wife briefly looks up from her book. “You OK?” “Yeah.” “Football?” “Yes.” “Of course.”

And before I fall asleep roughly two hours later – serving once again as a competent and reliable bedtime companion beside little Valderrama – I think once more about southern Sweden (and grin at the thought of Pettson and Findus – an old farmer and his cat – smuggling pyrotechnics into a stadium).

Maybe that night I dream about the Tony Yeboah goal against Wimbledon, Nuno Valente – or perhaps Peter Crouch and his sheepdog named Cafu.