Searching for playground football to feel less lonely…

Steven Chicken

Being good at football was the best skill you could possibly have at my primary school between about year three and year six. If you were good at football, or at least passable, then you automatically fitted in, at least during lunch break. If you had a flair for Wembley doubles, everyone would want to be your friend.

For a while in my early life I was skipped ahead a year at school, which makes quite a big difference to your social life when you’re that young. And that’s the whole reason I got into football: these slightly older boys (and it was all boys, though I would hope times have changed now) were all speaking a language I could not comprehend.

Luckily, my parents were both massive football fans, so I had the means to catch up pretty quickly. I’d spend my evenings and weekends poring over a football encyclopedia aimed at adults that I asked my mum to buy me in Wilko. It was here that I learned about Johan Cruyff and Eusebio and Roberto Baggio and the Busby Babes and the offside rule and the Maracana and the San Siro and Real Madrid and the evolution of the ball itself, and everything else, until I was utterly hooked and obsessed.

Pretty soon I knew more about any of this stuff than any of the boys on the playground, who would mostly share their dad’s third-hand opinions on Andy Cole or David May or whichever Manchester United player was seen as useless at the time. If that sounds dismissive and arrogant, then just imagine how popular I was with the other kids.

But while I had conquered the information side of the game in the dorkiest fashion possible, I was still rubbish at actually playing football. I became a regular starter in the school team, but at centre-back or as a very defensive full-back, and largely by virtue of just showing up every week. We lost every single 11-a-side game I ever played, and I never, ever scored. Not even once.

At high school, I stopped playing formal 11-a-side, but I’d still be on the school astroturf every lunchtime for a game of doubles or year 7s vs year 8s. I was never the worst player on the pitch, and I always enjoyed it, but I was a bit fat and slow and unathletic, and I never developed any ball skills beyond the bare essentials.

People would occasionally suggest I go to trials for the local youth team, but I never did – I was much too worried about having my very clear weaknesses exposed by the rigours of formalised coaching, and I was deathly afraid of the idea that adults might think I was rubbish at something, and wonder who I thought I was kidding even turning up.

I say ‘was’, but that’s inaccurate. At 31 years old, even more unfit than I was as a child, and not having played for 16 years, I’m still just as petrified by the prospect of turning up at the local park or soccer centre and trying to join in with a pub or five-a-side team.

What if they think I’m crap? What if, as I strongly suspect, I am indeed completely useless, and my teammates all get annoyed at me? What if they just plain don’t like me and decide to kick me to death? What if they’re all already a big group of mates who grew up together and they’re not especially open to the idea of this weird, dorky fat fella from the wrong side of the Pennines showing up and it’s all socially weird and awkward?

Making new friends gets harder as you get older, particularly as you and your existing friends move apart both physically and socially: more and more of us live away from our childhood home towns after moving away for university or work, and the economy forces many of us to move where the jobs are rather than where our friends and family live.

It can, at times, feel extremely lonely. Yet the fears outlined above prevent me from using one of my biggest and most passionate hobbies to find like-minded friends. I have dabbled with five-a-side (I used to run five- and six-a-side leagues for my day job, in fact), but found it only reinforced those fears, and that only made me feel lonelier still.

I can’t be unique in this. There must be thousands of people around the country who would like a bit of informal, non-competitive playground football like the stuff we played as kids, but lack a social network that includes four to ten friends who are just as interested in having a kickabout and are all available at the same time.

There are, thankfully, schemes aimed achieving exactly these ends: there is one in Leeds, in fact, the city closest to my home. Football For All’s entire ethos is to achieve exactly that: it doesn’t matter who you are, how good you are, what your background is, you’re welcome to just turn up and play. The only issue I have is that it’s on Sunday lunchtimes, when I am usually busy writing.

I would really love to see that kind of thing become more widespread, though. Football can’t only be for the physically fit and mentally competitive.

All most of us want, I think, is to just turn up and have fun and not take it too seriously and maybe go for a drink and play some Mario Kart afterwards. You wouldn’t think such a simple pleasure would be so difficult to find.

Steven Chicken is on Twitter