{"id":761049,"date":"2026-06-26T07:08:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T07:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/761049\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T07:08:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T07:08:09","slug":"seamas-oreilly-i-tell-my-son-the-truth-about-football","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/761049\/","title":{"rendered":"S\u00e9amas O\u2019Reilly: I tell my son the truth about football"},"content":{"rendered":"

As World Cup<\/a> fever continues all around us, I\u2019m undertaking a process of indoctrination. While my daughter is a little too young to have any interest yet, my son is about the same age as I was when I turned football-mad, but has had very little interest until now. He loves Pok\u00e9mon and Minecraft<\/a> and facts and numbers, and his football knowledge is limited to a vague awareness of Messi<\/a> and Ronaldo<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve tried to get him to watch football with me, but boredom usually sets in within minutes. I have managed to get him interested in five-minute highlights of games, compressing each roomy 90 minutes into a wall-to-wall collation of fouls, goals and screaming. \u201cHighlights are better,\u201d he tells me, and I inwardly cheer as I watch him reach for a book or tablet after three minutes, rather than the usual 30 seconds.<\/p>\n

As a player, he\u2019s less eager still. I used to bring him to a weekly toddler-ball club in our local park, during which I discovered just how good a three-year-old could be at football. Sadly, that three-year-old was named Jamie, and he spent most of his time dribbling rings around my son, who mostly practised falling over. When he professed a preference to spend his Saturday mornings playing chess or drawing illustrations for his home-made comics, I didn\u2019t mind very much. <\/p>\n

Through his eyes, I see the ways in which football might be off-putting: the baffling complexity of its internecine struggles; the labyrinthine intricacy of the game\u2019s rules; the perversity of the constant changes to those rules; and the fact that, at each season\u2019s end, it all starts over again, in a Sisyphean trudge toward an ever-moving horizon of permanent victory that will not and cannot arrive.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll even admit that the average football match has fewer propulsive thrills than either Gaelic games or rugby, sports I know much less about, but find objectively more attractive as spectator events. I\u2019ve attended two Premier League games in the past year and neither were as gripping as the two matches I went to at the Masters in Alexandra Palace in London in January \u2013 this despite snooker being a sport about which I know the square root of nothing at all.<\/p>\n

Most of my own love of football came from playing. I was a wiry, bookish nerd who grew up in open countryside with little else to do than play endless one-on-ones with my little brother Conall in the field behind our house. This stopped short of granting me even moderate skill, but it did make me roughly 10,000 times better at football than I looked, and I prospered greatly due to the glorious alchemy of lowered expectations. <\/p>\n

Soon, I realised there was no greater social lubricant on planet Earth. Stick 20 children in a room and watch them hug the walls like wallflowers at a mineral disco. Throw them in a field with a football, and they\u2019ll be lifelong friends within minutes.<\/p>\n

I suppose it\u2019s this aspect of football I\u2019d love my son to cherish: the community, the bonding, the bloody-minded obsession. And thankfully, I\u2019ve seen success in persuading him of this via football\u2019s one, true dirty-little-secret: it is also the single nerdiest thing on planet Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is every single team and player that\u2019s taking part,\u201d I tell him on the third day of the tournament, handing him an official guide crammed with numbers and stats. I see his eyes widen with every grid and graph, a smile spreading across his face as I unfurl the ungainly wall chart collating all 104 games across the six weeks to come. I point out the key players, the favourites, the dark horses. And the formations, the tactics, the hidden histories of streaks and curses coursing back through nearly a century of World Cups that have gone before.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0How Minecraft became a cultural phenomenon: \u2018I have hundreds of worlds. When I get sick of one I just start again\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truth about football,\u201d I say, as his head hums with all this delicious data, \u201cis that it\u2019s just Pok\u00e9mon for human beings.\u201d Soon, he\u2019s studying the brackets and theorising on which teams will win and by how much. Yes, he\u2019s perhaps overly obsessed with the matches in which Ronaldo and Messi will be playing, but I don\u2019t mind since he\u2019s soon asking me, with genuine interest, when the next game is on.<\/p>\n

I check my phone and come undone, remembering that 60 per cent of the games will be on after 11pm. \u201cLet\u2019s stick to the graphs first,\u201d I tell him, \u201cand we can catch the highlights in the morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d he says, a dreamy look on his face as he reaches for a pen to fill in the games that have already taken place, \u201cthe highlights are better anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As World Cup fever continues all around us, I\u2019m undertaking a process of indoctrination. While my daughter is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":761050,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,36456,596,121458,5275,215260,363401,85,21418],"class_list":["post-761049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cristiano-ronaldo","tag-football","tag-lionel-messi","tag-magazine","tag-minecraft","tag-seamas-o-reilly","tag-sports","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761049\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/761050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}