Enjoy the pain, never tire of the beauty: some advice for football fans in 2025 | Max Rushden
Share:
Whoever you support it’s a long year ahead, but here’s a few tips from one of many who should be old enough to know better. Chances are none of you have spent time looking back on my 2024 attempts to produce a column alongside esteemed journalists who actually write for a living. But through the various subjects, from set-piece coaches to VAR, from the dark arts to PSR, the one consistent theme appears to be a fortnightly mid-life crisis published straight on to your Guardian app.
![[Max Rushden]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/09/Max-Rushden,-L.png?width=180&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Perhaps the opportunity to stare at a blank document on a laptop while contemplating life once every other week has staved off other more visceral cliches; skinny three-quarter-length jeans, a moustache, a motorbike seem some way off. But sometimes when I’m driving along, I see groups of young people just whiling away the hours drinking in the Australian evening sunshine in the park. I want to stop the car, get out and explain to them how thrilling that is, that there’ll come a time when because of geography or kids or work or whatever, this won’t be a thing – to really revel in that moment.
![[Never stop playing. Nothing compares.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/5d194f1cfd8a9a4f34fe3c858bb428eb35f67526/0_264_5328_3197/master/5328.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Obviously I don’t do it, because I’m not insane. I don’t want a group of twentysomethings to recall that time a weird grey-haired middle-aged man got out of his car to have an earnest conversation about the passage of time with them. Such angst isn’t helped by the fact that there is a photo of me from 2010 on each article. Ethan Nwaneri was three when that picture was taken. Now he’s starting in the Premier League. I don’t look like that in the mirror.
