How I fell out of love with football

The new Premier League season has begun and I don’t know what to think. I tried to watch all of England’s Euro 2020 matches, but I never made it to the end of any of them. When the final against Italy kicked off, I retired to a quiet room feeling angst and confusion. Why was I so out of step with everyone else?

Gareth Southgate’s players seem like lovely boys. And while they probably represent the better aspects of our evolving culture, it seems likely we may soon discover that they remain fallible. But if the response of the public to England’s triumphs and tragedy was one thing, the reaction of the media was quite another. It drew out the very worst reverse snobbery in me. Put simply, the more people who like football who didn’t used to like football, the less I like football. Yes, that’s childish and self-defeating.