I am not good at football.

On failing well and often.

I have never been good at football, my go-to justification nowadays is that I “haven’t played since school” but that obfuscates the truth that even in school, what I did could hardly be considered playing. I was a chubby asthmatic who hated running - which, to be fair, isn’t far off the mark to an accurate description of current me - and despite an early growth spurt that made me a valuable goalkeeper, eventually my stocky build didn’t fit the mould of a rangy shot-stopper and I was duly relegated to the loose bulldog defence that defines playground games. Still, I hated running, so it’s not like I had the passion or competitiveness to get sweaty chasing down loose balls, really I was just the ‘kid who hangs around the far post chatting to the goalie’. 

This continued for a long time, though I do have one positive footballing memory which presages the exact type of football ‘fan’ I would eventually become. Year Eight: a tumble in a too-small soft play area left me with a fractured toe. I’d been watching House and thought Hugh Laurie was the coolest, smartest asshole there ever was and though I couldn’t  imitate his piercing blue eyes, I could dig out my granddad’s old walking stick and hobble to school like a junior pensioner. Not the smartest move for an 11-year-old, coolness-wise. But it got me out of P.E. and the dreaded running, instead I was co-opted as a mini coach, leading drills and offering instruction in a sport I had absolutely no technical knowledge of and was demonstrably terrible at. It was fun, though, and whether my teacher just felt sorry for me when he commended my coaching abilities didn’t matter, my burgeoning teenage ego was inflated just enough to light a little tactical spark. 

I lost the kid weight eventually, and enjoyed both the newfound social capital of broad shoulders as well as putting them to use. Basketball, American football, dodgeball; now that I wasn’t hyper-concerned with the way my body looked when it moved, I started enjoying sports in general, but… only the ones I was immediately good at. I didn’t have the patience to be bad at things, I got snappy and irritated if I couldn’t fret a guitar properly and thus wasn’t able to play an instrument until I was 19. As for actual competition, my short stint in the school rugby team lost its momentum when I watched someone break their leg in training. I didn’t want to twist my ankle, let alone break anything - I had GCSEs to worry about. So I shied away from tackles, rarely chased down balls, all I was good for was a strong pair of legs in a scrum. The gym was my habit, I bought Men’s Health magazine and absorbed all the fitness blog knowledge I could, I didn’t think about football at all after that. 

Let’s skip ahead nine years. The now-overblown ego has been hyper-focused on academic achievement for most of them; I have become a brain-only organism, my body is solely a processor for alcohol, or the reluctant participant in half-hearted gym sessions that just feel like going through the motions. I teach friends how to work out, which is itself a reward, but the exercise I do myself is primarily a by-product. And still no football. There’s a brief post-pandemic reignition of my interest in boxing, but as I still don’t feel like getting punched in the face, it’s really just to balance out the drinking and Uber Eats. Suddenly, the real world: a job, a life, decisions. It’s all a little overwhelming and I really don’t fancy lifting heavy things when it already feels like there’s plenty of weight on my shoulders. It’s slump time. 

But it’s also summer, which always brings the increased bodily awareness of being surrounded by tanned torsos and - God help them - joggers. My basement room is hardly the place to be when the sun is out there making everything look appealing: those impromptu cricket park sessions (I wonder who the hell has 21 friends all available at the same time?), casual kickabouts among the barbecue smoke in Hyde Park - the city is buzzing with a frenzy of activity, and I feel compelled to move just to feel part of it. Enter an old, unused tennis racket in the corner of my housemate’s bedroom. Perfect, there’s a free court just over the road and Wimbledon is on. 

I had never been into tennis, but in the post-university fugue that descends on everyone eventually, you have to cling on tight to every impulsive interest that might bring some focused meaning into the rhythms of work, eat, drink, sleep. So I watched matches, I read books, I listened to podcasts, I absorbed absolutely everything I could about the sport in a way that I had previously reserved for my now-stalling academic interests. Most importantly: I played. At first I could rope a few friends in to hit rallies with, but as my interest (and that increasingly overcompetitive ego) intensified, I became addicted to improving. I practiced serving until I got tendonitis (foreshadowing), I hit balls against the side of the house, probably drawing odd looks through windows and annoyance from passing cars. But I still wasn’t playing, not really. Then I moved to Manchester.

Anyone who has gone to their first group session of an unfamiliar sport will know the feeling. Even at 24 - and significantly less socially inept than I was as a teenager - I still felt that clawing outsidery-ness that comes to walking into a group of people that you assume all know each other but don’t know you. I was unproven, unblooded, an unknown entity intruding on the natural order. The court itself was new to me, a squeaky, hard floor marked with lines I still barely knew where to stand in - the courts I had been using before were marked with potholes and sometimes didn’t even have a net, this felt like the big leagues in comparison. It wasn’t a good introduction. I had practiced serving a thousand times, but had rarely had the ball coming back towards me. I’d had timid baseline exchanges with a colleague, but volleys? Court coverage? Doubles? My partner got increasingly frustrated at having to point at where I should be. If I dumped a volley into the net, lobbed a forehand into the ceiling, or left the court wide open with my uncertain positioning, I felt a glowering stare drill into my back. When it came to choosing partners for the next game, I found myself reliving those memories of school football. I was picked last, she didn’t even look at me.

I didn’t go back to that session. I felt like I’d jumped in at the deep end without learning how to tread water first. I felt embarrassed, demotivated, how had I entertained the notion that I could participate in sports when the majority of my childhood was defined by my inability to? I’d had my fun serving to an empty court, but summer was over now, and I had failed. Or that’s what I thought on the creaking tram back from the sports centre, those childhood wounds of being a sporting liability feeling ever rawer. But I wasn’t a child anymore, and sure, I’ve never been the fittest, but what had changed since then most of all was inside. I had tried many things that I had no affinity for or talent in: drawing, martial arts, music - but I had tried them. I entertained no ideas of becoming a professional musician, but I blunt-forced my way through learning the piano introduction to Norman Fucking Rockwell simply because I wanted to, I learned guitar was useful for me not in its productive capacities but in its therapeutic benefits, putting my hands to work on something repetitive simply to occupy my mind with the singular focus needed to get the fingering right. I had served a tennis ball a thousand times not wholly so that I would be good at tennis, but because hitting the ball felt good. It felt good. The process itself was the product for me, the reward of simply doing something with presence of mind enough to appreciate the absorption of self that such an activity required. Getting better at tennis was a by-product, the real goal was to lose myself in something, to use and appreciate my body in the way it was meant to be.

And so it was. I found a new, more sociable and beginner-welcoming group to play with, and lost myself in the process of minute improvements. Not because I wanted to win, or start collecting LTA points through local matches, but because I wanted to play good tennis. Failure is a misnomer if you’re referring to the process of improvement. It’s never a straight line, it ebbs and flows, you’ll have days where you feel like a beginner again and days where you feel on fire. Through it all, though, the real skill you’re improving is your perspective. To get good at tennis, you have to make peace with the inevitability of playing poorly. None of this is to say I suddenly became a tennis god, but I felt comfortable on court, I no longer felt always like a liability. I stopped playing the percentages and started going for winners. Whether they were in or out didn’t matter, it was simply the act of practicing those high-risk shots that improves your ability to make them in the first place. I started playing four or five times a week, even leading some sessions where the coach wasn’t available. That spark I’d felt at eleven years old when ‘coaching’ football drills was back, nothing felt better than helping someone make an adjustment to improve, supporting them through the painful learning curve that I had only recently myself experienced. The only difference now was that I actually knew what I was talking about. 

So where the hell does football come into this? Well, the more comfortable I felt on a tennis court, the less that all-encompassing absorption into the tennis world was producing its lovely dopamine release. I knew the scores, I knew how to play, I had reached a level where I felt I had achieved something of worth - not by winning anything, but by overcoming myself and persevering where previously I would have given up. As I said, I felt comfortable. Yet, the main thing I had learned through my experience with tennis was that the rewards weren’t found in the places you felt comfortable. Whether by conscious recognition of this, or simply a personality defect that causes me to impulsively chase dopamine, my addiction to tennis had waned. I had moved to a new place, I was working much more, I couldn’t fit my usual 4 to 5 sessions a week in and I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to either. Importantly, the books I was devouring had also changed. Just as I had developed my passion for tennis through watching matches while reading about its history, stars, and tactics, I had suddenly become interested in a blind spot in my sports knowledge: the beautiful game itself. 

For four months while in the zenith of my tennis-playing, I had been reading books on football tactics and finding myself much more involved in the goings on at Manchester United (almost certainly helped by a slight addiction to FIFA career mode). But I wasn’t playing football, that still felt like a place I wasn’t welcome, especially when tennis had begun to feel comfortable, something I could perform well at without necessarily going through the painful emotions of learning and improving. Then my lovely friend tendonitis sprung back up. I have a bad habit of rotating my wrist on the forehand (a big no-no, but a likely consequence of being self-taught), and after a few too many of these I found myself once again back in a wrist brace with some time off the court. I tried the gym again; found it boring again. A rogue spin class felt like a good workout but I knew by now that my dislike of cardio wasn’t entirely owing to my childhood, but because I hated doing it for its own sake. Playing tennis five times a week was undoubtedly the most cardio I’d ever done, but it didn’t feel like cardio. Some people love the thrill of watching definitive numbers improve: 5k times, deadlift PRs, even resting heart rates. But frankly, I don’t care about any of that. Tennis was a way of feeling entirely present and absorbed in an activity that also happened to have physical benefits, it improved my health but I never focused on that aspect of it. Essentially, I was a dog chasing balls, the exercise was barely in my mind, I just liked chasing balls. But now I had a bum wrist, a busy schedule, and much like a neglected dog, no more balls to chase. Enter serendipity…

‘Walking football’ is sort of what pickleball is to tennis players, a more accessible, less demanding, and usually more social version of the ‘pro’ sport (yes, there are pro pickleball players, but really they’re all just failed or old tennis players). For some miraculous reason, my tennis club started holding walking football sessions. This was my chance. I hadn’t kicked a ball in years, with the exception of those heart-pounding moments where one rolls towards you in a park and you have to work up the courage to boot it back to whichever teenager it belongs to without suffering a mortifying display of poor coordination which announces to them that you were always the last picked in school. I had about a 50% success rate in those moments. Fortunately, though, the accessibility of walking football makes it a perfect re-introduction to the basics. No running (thank god), no balls above head height (meaning controlled chesting and heading don’t have to be in your repertoire), and ‘no physical contact’ (this is a lie, there is a lot of physical contact but usually nobody cares unless it’s a 9-year-old you’re shoulder barging). The game is simple: work the space, make good passes, try not to whiff the shot onto the roof. With a slower pace, the environmental stimuli required for your brain and eyes to learn how the ball reacts to certain touches and how players beat their man is much easier to absorb, and defending is less about getting pace-abused by speedy wingers and more just being in the right place to block attacking progression. For my first session I was mainly a safe pair of hands in goal. I made some good saves, distributed quickly and even got an assist from a good ball out to the opposing goal (we are playing on half a tennis court, mind you, so distribution isn’t too tricky). But my time outfield had limitations, I had a decent enough notion of positioning to open up space, and could fire (simple) passes out to better players than me. I even scored one goal (shortly after completely skying my first attempt). This was a decently comfortable reintroduction to a sport that I previously only had scar tissue for, but with these sessions only being an hour a month, I wanted more. 

For a football-obsessed nation, you’d think it would be easy to find opportunities to play and practice the sport basically everywhere. Seemingly not. My suspicion is that most 5-a-side teams are groups of friends or colleagues who’ve known each other for ages and so don’t really need to co-opt additional members. If I was around 6 years old, I would be spoiled for choice, but there are limited options for a ‘no previous experience’ mid-20s guy with no male friends. So, I played the walking football sessions when they came up and kept an eye out, I took a ball out to a park for a bit of practice in passing and shooting (echoes of serving to an empty court, with all the false low-pressure reassurance that entails). Then, eventually, I found a casual 5-a-side session about half an hour away on the bus. 

Walking football was a reliable re-introduction to just using my feet in general, with the lower pace and my own little practice session making me feel more comfortable moving, passing, and shooting. What walking football quintessentially lacks, in a word, is running. God, there is so much running. Tennis has running too, sure, but in doubles play it’s mainly in very short bursts and with lots of little setup breaks, I’d also been on a break with my wrist injury and well… stamina is always the first thing to go. Even on a comparatively small 5-a-side pitch, the constant switches in phases of play results in this seemingly endless dialectic of pushing forward and tracking back. Yes, this is obvious to anyone who has watched football, I just thought it wouldn’t be as bad on some little outdoor astroturf. I lasted about 10 minutes. One familiar feeling from my tennis experience was the effect of fatigue: once you’re out of gas, your technique and reactions slip too, you get sloppy. I got sloppy. I thought, naively, that my decent positional awareness would save me. Once I was already panting from making runs up and down the pitch, I dropped back into our own half and decided to be a steadfast sweeper, mopping up attacking moves and generally getting in the way. I quickly realised, though, that it is just as tiring to track opposition runs as it is to perform them yourself. There is no escape on a football pitch, either you run constantly or you get beaten. I got beaten. A lot. My attacking contributions were like if Messi were both unfit and untalented, strolling around not for energy conservation and tactical genius, but because he was dead knackered and needed to look like he was doing something. 

Once again I found myself in the familiar position of being humbled by my own inadequacy. This was different to tennis though, there my level of technical unfamiliarity was evenly split among each relevant facet of the game - my stamina was poor but then, so were my backhand, forehand, volleys, just about everything: there was a consistent baseline of improvement to work toward in all areas. With football, I found myself saying ‘if I wasn’t tired’ a lot. I saw the space for a good run, but I was too tired. I saw an attacker peeling off from my marking, but I was too tired to follow. Towards the end, it even got to the point where a routine shot block was hampered by being too tired to correctly judge the position of my own leg. My stamina issues were blaring a red alert in my mind. That was the mantra in my head on the bus ride back, that I was too unfit to keep up. But really, this was still an oversimplification, and an unhelpful one at that. Yes, my stamina issues were apparent, but did I dribble well? Could I perform well in 1-on-1s? Did I always pick out the right pass? The answer to all three were no, and though that ever-childlike ego still has a kneejerk reaction to get frustrated by this and want to quit, to do so would be to disparage and contradict everything I have learned and just written about tennis.

Yes, there are certainly differences between the two sports, many amateur football players likely had an interest in it during school, some have even played semi-pro before, whereas I may as well be starting from scratch. But that’s not an excuse either, it’s a common phrase in tennis that ‘you can only beat the player in front of you,’ but when you’re learning, I think the player in front of you is irrelevant; you can only beat yourself. This is the same in football. Are these players better, more experienced, more skilled than me? Yes. But I didn’t learn how to play good tennis by beating my friends who had rarely picked up a racket before. I learned it by losing. Again and again. Every missed shot is a new piece of information for your mind to subconsciously interpret and for your body to consequently readjust for the next time. In fact, the only contribution your consciousness has within this process is in the ability to regulate your emotions enough that you don’t actively inhibit your own sensory learning. It can be frustrating to fail, yes. But the frustration is just a matter of adjusting expectations, of getting out of your own way, even of not viewing it as failure whatsoever. Because yes, I am bad at football, I have always been bad at football. If I still had the same brain I had as a child, that historical inability to perform would be a justification in itself to give up entirely. But trying isn’t failure. Doing isn’t failure. Failure itself is nothing but the opportunity to learn. I didn’t hit a clean, pinpoint ace for the first eight months of playing tennis, and I never would have hit one if not for the thousands of missed serves before that. Football is no different, you just use your feet instead.