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Jean-Philippe Toussaint, in his recent book Football, observes that the sport is ‘measured and appreciated’ in the imagination. Toussaint, an intellectually fanatical supporter of the Belgian national team, is used to failure. Indeed, he is an acolyte of the view that football support is built on failure. After all, aren’t the grown men and women on the terraces of English stadia simply not good enough for a place on the pitch? Am I not, in writing passionately about football, merely replacing the frustration of not being the world-class midfielder that I was born to be?
Leicester City are living out the fever dream of a football fan, borne into the real world on a hysterical current of goodwill. Across the country, with the exception of a small pocket of North London, football fans are being told to celebrate Leicester’s title win because it is ‘good for football’.
What Leicester have achieved is the imagination made real.
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