The Joys of Disappointment

(For context: the English football team have just lost the final of the European Championship. It’s their second defeat in the final in the last five years, and marks 58 years since the English football team last won an international trophy, despite having invented the sport and making it our national obsession. Ironic, really.)

I can’t make my mind up about football.

I know that’s not very English.

It just gives me serious cognitive dissonance.

It’s tough because I really like game itself: the pure, unscripted drama of it; the spectacle; the tension.

I think it’s probably the perfect sport: the confines of an incredibly simple set of rules - you must kick this ball into that net - breed endless variation and creativity.

It’s a team game in the way most other team games fail to be, and this sets the stage for huge characters, incredible moments and perpetual drama.

I just have a real aversion to everything that comes with it.

I can’t get over grown adults who invest all of their time, money and emotional energy in the outcomes of a group of wealthy strangers who aren’t even aware that they exist.

Highly-educated, unbearably smug Guardian journalists who floridly discuss it as if it’s something that actually matters, like war or disease or art.

Entire TV and Radio stations and vast swathes of the internet devoted to hysterically reacting to it: analysing it, screaming and crying and laughing about it.

Those people for whom it becomes their entire personality.

Who refer to elite collections of professional athletes as ‘we’ whilst sweating on the couch.

Who wear other men’s names on their own backs.

It gives me the creeps.

And yet, obviously, I can’t stop watching it.

And I read the articles. And I listen to the podcasts. And I turn on the post-match phone-ins. And I fall down the YouTube rabbit holes.

And I quietly hate myself.

I was reminded of all of this last night as England lost to Spain.

For three hours or so, the entire country gathered to sing strange adaptations of Bruce Springsteen and Neil Diamond songs, drink overpriced beer and despair.

Once again, the most precious dream they’d had this week - of some people who weren’t them getting to hold a golden cup for a bit - came crashing down around them.

And, of course, they’re all devastated and furious and every powerful emotion in between.

Yet, of course, they’re not.

They’ll all go back to work today and life will go on.

And let’s be honest - had England won the European championship, not a single one of them would actually have contributed anything towards the success.

And so I’m not sure any of them really have the right to be that upset about the lack of it.

This might say more about me than it does anything else but if I was a professional footballer, I’d really hate football fans.

Imagine dedicating the entirety of your life to playing football.

Fine-tuning your own existence - everything from your social life to your sleep schedule - in order to allow you to reach a level of performance that almost nobody in the world ever does.

And your reward?

Millions of permanently outraged, pre-diabetic strangers, demented by tepid lager and self-righteous indignation, living empty lives of their own, will howl at you from the stands, and pick holes in you in their WhatsApp groups, and obsess constantly about you, forever.

(Or, at least, until you retire from injury at 35).

And the worst part?

In some strange way, you owe them your very existence.

These people, who have never come close to the standards you’ve managed to achieve in anything.

They are your appointed judges, critics and, in some sense, your owners.

Because the truth is that if people like them didn’t like football so much, there wouldn’t be any football.

I’m not sure I could cope with it.

It sounds like some sort of hellish Faustian pact; some sort of toxic relationship that you can’t stand, but can’t leave.

The other thing we as a nation need to remember is that, in my opinion, winning would be the worst thing for us anyway.

It would fly in the face of everything we hold dear about ourselves.

We hate people that win.

Winning is for Americans (sorry to my American readers - though this is probably one of the most flattering insults I can manage).

We don’t win - we lose: sometimes humbly, sometimes agonisingly, but always with a sense of poetry and pathos.

And I think that’s for the best.

What would we do if we had won?

Where do we go from there?

I have my suspicions.

We’d be happy, for all of 15 minutes, before the next failure made its inevitable appearance.

Because you can’t keep winning forever.

And then?

The psychodrama, the anger, the criticism, would all come flooding back.

And so what would have been the point of it in the first place?

Much better to live down here forever, in the valley of disappointment.

At least, down here, there’s a lovely mountain peak to gaze longingly up at.

At least, down here, we can hope and dream and imagine and wish.

What would life be like up there anyway?

We’d be left alone with ourselves: fully-realised, as good as we were ever going to be, with nothing to become.

Sounds terrifying.

So, for now…

Keep dreaming.

Rob