I woke up this morning and reached for my phone before my eyes were properly open. This is not unusual. This is what I have done every morning for the past five weeks because there was always something to check. A result from overnight. A team sheet. A VAR controversy to argue about with strangers on the internet before breakfast. A Messi highlight. An England update. Something.
This morning there was nothing.
No fixtures. No scores. No post-match analysis to disagree with. No pundits saying something so ridiculous that you screenshot it and send it to three group chats before you have got out of bed. No countdown to the next match. No next match at all.
The World Cup is over. The Premier League does not start for another month. And I am sat here in my living room in South London on a Monday morning with a cup of tea and absolutely no idea what I am supposed to do with myself.
This is the gap. The footballing void. The dead zone between the end of one thing and the beginning of the next that every football fan in the country is currently navigating with varying degrees of success and dignity. If you are reading this then you are probably in the same place I am. Lost. Bored. Checking the BBC Sport app every forty five minutes in the hope that something has happened even though you know nothing has happened because there is nothing to happen.
Welcome to the longest month of the year.
The Five Stages of Football Withdrawal
I have been through this before. Every football fan has been through this before. And yet it catches you off guard every single time as though it is a completely new experience that nobody could have predicted despite it happening at the exact same point in the calendar every single year.
The first stage is denial. You wake up on the first morning after the last match and check your phone. Nothing. You check again twenty minutes later. Still nothing. You open four different apps in case one of them has found a game somewhere in the world that you could conceivably care about. You briefly consider watching highlights of matches you have already watched the highlights of. You close the apps and put the phone down. You pick it up again eleven minutes later.
The second stage is bargaining. You tell yourself that there must be football somewhere. The MLS is on. The Australian league exists. There is almost certainly a pre-season tournament in Asia that involves a team you have vaguely heard of. You flick through channels looking for something, anything, that involves twenty two people and a ball. You watch seven minutes of a match between two teams you could not locate on a map before admitting to yourself that this is not solving the problem and turning it off.
The third stage is anger. Directed primarily at the calendar. Why is there a gap at all. Why cannot the Premier League start immediately after the World Cup final. Who decided that footballers need rest. They are professional athletes earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a week and they cannot play a forty five game season without a holiday in July. You know this is unreasonable. You do not care. You are angry and you are bored and the two feelings are feeding each other in a way that is making you genuinely difficult to be around.
The fourth stage is depression. It arrives on the first Saturday without football. You wake up, eat breakfast, and sit down in the living room at approximately half past two for no reason other than the fact that your body has been trained across decades of conditioning to be in that specific position at that specific time on a Saturday. There is no match. There is no Jeff Stelling. There is no Soccer Saturday. There is nothing except a BBC cooking show and the slow, creeping realisation that you have several hours to fill and no mechanism for filling them.
The fifth stage is acceptance. This one takes longer than you expect. You eventually acknowledge that the gap exists, that it will not be shortened by your frustration, and that you will survive it in the same way you have survived every previous summer. Badly. Ungracefully. With a lot of unnecessary refreshing of the BBC Sport app and several ill advised conversations with your partner about whether they fancy watching a documentary about the 1970 World Cup.
The Things We Pretend to Enjoy
Every summer, for approximately three weeks, football fans across the country discover that they have interests and responsibilities that have been quietly accumulating since August.
The garden. Every football fan’s garden receives its annual attention during the gap between seasons. The lawn gets mowed. The hedge gets trimmed. The patio furniture gets wiped down and sat on for one afternoon before the fixtures start again and the garden returns to its natural state of gentle neglect until next July.
DIY. The shelf that has been wonky since October. The bathroom door that does not close properly. The light in the spare room that flickers when you turn it on. All of these things have been on a list since the clocks went back and all of them will receive urgent attention during the football gap because you need something to do with your hands and your partner has noticed that the list exists and the football has stopped.
Family time. Your children remember what you look like. Your partner has a conversation with you that lasts longer than the halftime interval. You go for a walk that is not timed around a kickoff. You visit relatives you have been promising to visit since Christmas. You sit in a beer garden on a Saturday afternoon and make eye contact with other men who are also pretending to enjoy themselves while internally counting down the days until the Community Shield.
Hobbies. Some football fans claim to have hobbies. Golf. Fishing. Running. Reading. These hobbies exist in the same way the garden exists, receiving three weeks of intense attention before being abandoned the moment the fixture list is published and the real calendar begins again.
I am not judging anyone for this. I am describing myself. I spent last Tuesday evening reading a book for the first time since March and it took me forty minutes to stop reaching for my phone to check a score that did not exist.
The Transfer Window as Methadone
Thank God for the transfer window.
Without the transfer window the football gap would be genuinely unbearable. Three weeks of nothing with nothing to discuss and nothing to speculate about and nothing to get irrationally excited or angry about. The transfer window exists during the gap and it saves us from ourselves.
It is not football. Nobody pretends it is football. Refreshing Fabrizio Romano’s Twitter feed every six minutes waiting for the words Here We Go to appear next to a player your club has been linked with for three weeks is not the same as watching a match. It is not even close.
But it is something. It is content. It is drama. It is the possibility that your club might sign someone who will change everything, or that a rival might lose someone who will ruin their season, or that a transfer will happen that is so unexpected and so exciting that it temporarily fills the void where football used to be.
The tier system has become its own form of entertainment. Tier one, reliable. Tier two, probably true. Tier three, could go either way. Tier four, someone’s nan overheard something in Tesco and tweeted it. Football fans now spend more time during the summer debating the reliability of journalists than they spend during the season debating the performances of players. We have turned transfer rumour verification into a competitive sport because the actual sport is not available.
I spent an hour yesterday reading a thread about whether a particular Italian journalist is Tier two or Tier three for AC Milan transfers. I do not support AC Milan. I do not watch Serie A. I have never been to the San Siro. But it was football adjacent and football adjacent is all I have right now.
Pre-Season Friendlies and the Annual Delusion
In approximately two weeks the pre-season friendlies will begin and the annual cycle of completely irrational optimism will start all over again.
Your club will fly to the United States or Asia or a random part of Europe and play against a team you have never heard of. They will win 5-0. The new signing will score a hat trick. The young lad from the academy will look sharp. The manager will say encouraging things in the press conference about the squad’s fitness levels and their commitment to a new style of play.
You will convince yourself, on the basis of a friendly against a Thai All Stars XI played in thirty five degree heat in front of a crowd that is ninety percent tourists, that this is your year. That the new signing is the missing piece. That the academy kid is ready. That the manager has found something in pre-season that transforms everything.
Every single football fan does this. Every single year. Despite decades of evidence that pre-season form is the most meaningless data set in the history of sport. A team that wins every pre-season friendly can finish sixteenth. A team that loses to a League Two side in a warm up match can win the title. The results are irrelevant, the performances are unreliable, and the conclusions drawn from them are almost universally wrong.
I will watch every single one of Palace’s pre-season matches. I will get excited about a player who scores twice against a lower league team in a half empty stadium. I will tell myself that Glasner has something planned. I will enter the new season with a level of optimism that the previous forty seasons of being a Palace fan should have permanently extinguished.
Because that is what football fans do. We learn nothing. We forget everything. And we start again every August with the blank, beautiful, completely unfounded belief that this year is going to be different.
The Countdown
The Premier League starts on the sixteenth of August. That is twenty seven days away. Twenty seven days without competitive English football. Twenty seven days of gardens and DIY and transfer rumours and pre-season friendlies and Saturday afternoons that feel like they are missing their entire reason for existing.
We will survive it. We always survive it. Not well, not gracefully, not without several arguments with people who live in our houses about the amount of time we spend refreshing social media looking for football content that does not exist. But we survive.
The trick, I have found, is to accept that the gap is part of the experience. Football would not feel the way it does on the opening weekend of the season if we did not have to suffer through the weeks without it first. The anticipation is part of the product. The deprivation makes the return sweeter. The boredom is the price you pay for the joy.
At least that is what I tell myself while I am sitting in a beer garden on a Saturday afternoon pretending to enjoy a conversation about anything other than football.
Twenty seven days. I can do this.
Probably.
