It’s the middle of summer, which means a new football season. The glory game hardly sleeps these days: we’re in the midst of the Women’s World Cup and there is the constant spectre of the Saudi power grab on men’s elite football. As a fan, I’ll still embrace this hypothetical moment of renewal. But the big kick-off for me will come in early September with the return of the Thursday night football game that, for the last 25 years, I’ve played in almost every week.
I first got involved with it in 1998, when I was invited along by friends in the time-honoured way. Most of my Thursday evenings since then, amid changes of jobs and circumstance, have been defined by a routine of ferreting around the house for contact lenses, grabbing whatever bits of kit I can find and shoving a towel into a tatty old orange bag. At about 8.20pm, summoned by the beep of a horn outside the house, I’ll squeeze into the back of a car that was patently not designed for four portly middle-aged men.
For one hour every week, on a pitch in central London, between 12 and 18 of us – whoever turns up really – will hoof a ball about with varying degrees of humour, skill and athleticism. Extensive post-match analysis in the pub will follow. Perhaps we’ll segue daringly into current affairs, possibly with a dash of Premier League chitchat. But mainly the talk is about the game.
Over a quarter of a century, this humdrum routine has become a cornerstone of my life. My wife of a mere 19 years knows that getting me to do anything else on Thursdays requires months of diplomatic groundwork. And while it feels like an intensely personal ritual, variations are being acted out up and down the country all the time: according to Sport England’s Active Lives survey, more than 2.7 million people aged 16 or older in England played at least one game of small-sided football in the year to November 2022.
Considering there are so many of us, we casual footballers blend in to the background remarkably well. But look again and you’ll see us round and about in the evening, plodding home in our kit with bags over our shoulders. In Above Head Height, the journalist James Brown’s memoir about five-a-side football culture, he writes: “We play football for love, not money. We play it for life and we play it everywhere.” But a big part is also about the deep bonds of male friendship.
It has been noted before that men often need a framework to hold their friendships together. What I treasure most about Thursday night football is how, over the years, it has supported so many different versions of that.
There’s a core group of players at the heart of our game, along with a slowly revolving cast. We’ve been a support group for frazzled new dads, dashing back into town for a kickabout after reading bedtime stories. We’ve been a place for newcomers to the city to make friends, or for others to kill a few hours while passing through. We’ve also witnessed our share of relationship breakups, work setbacks and life’s other trickier moments.
Some of my fellow Thursday night footballers I count among my oldest and closest friends. Others I know less well. But through the game I feel like I have a unique and indelible connection with all of them.
One of the founding players was John, a gentle giant who preferred deeds to words as a way of affirming friendships. He’d given up playing several years earlier – but we never stopped nagging him about coming back. A couple of years ago, I thought we’d finally got there; but then he died, suddenly and shockingly. So we’ll never get to see him bustle around the pitch again in his Rangers top, making his clever, selfless passes and occasionally banging one into the net.
At his funeral, to which some of us were honoured to be invited despite lockdown restrictions, we talked about the friendship of Thursday night football and John’s part in helping to create it. He would have absolutely hated a fuss being made about that sort of thing. But as legacies go, I reckon it takes some beating.
The football does matter, of course; a precious window every week for forgetting other worries. Mostly it veers from the ridiculous to the occasionally sublime. Like the time earlier this year when Matt met a corner on the edge of the box with a rocket volley that flew into the top of the net, a goal so breathtaking that he got a round of applause in the pub afterwards.
It was the sort of moment that might cause you to ponder hanging up your boots afterwards. But then again, why on earth would you want to do that?
Graham Snowdon is the acting editor of Guardian Weekly
