I have Football Brain.
No, it’s not an officially recognised condition – not yet, anyway – but it very much is a real thing, and something I’m confident plenty of people reading this will be able to relate to.
I’m in my thirties now and, as is the way, have largely accepted that my days of playing football are all but over.
Weekend mornings of 11-a-side on some poorly drained, trench foot-inducing playing field are a distant memory. And a combination of work commitments and family life have swallowed up any time that might once have been allocated for the odd game of midweek five-a-side.
It’s perhaps because of these withdrawal symptoms that I’ve come to notice how my brain has been irreversibly conditioned to make me act like I’m playing football, even when I’m not. This is what I’ve come to know as Football Brain.
My Football Brain epiphany moment came when I was in my own home about a year ago. My son, barely eight months old at the time, had just about learned to sit up independently and was doing so while playing with a couple of toys on the living room floor. Aware that he was still a little bit wobbly, I stayed close by, just in case he fell backwards.
Sure enough, he did fall backwards.
With a fraction of a second before the back of his head thudded against the laminate flooring, parental instinct probably should have made me lunge forward and try and catch him with my hands.
Instead, I quickly shuffled forward and stuck out a leg, cushioning the back of his head down to the ground with the inside of my right foot – a bit like Dennis Bergkamp’s first touch against Argentina at France ’98, only I wasn’t being closed down by Roberto Ayala.
For a number of reasons, what had occurred worried me – even if I was quite pleased with my control.
It swiftly dawned on me that I hadn’t even been looking at my first-born child as he came to settle on the floor, wide-eyed and totally bemused by what had just happened. No, instead of that being my primary concern, I already had my head up, hoping to spot a teammate moving into space.
Even more worrying was the thought of what my Football Brain might have made me do had he not been sitting on the floor when he took his tumble. Had he fallen from a more inviting height, well … would I have been subliminally tempted to let fly on the volley?
I tweeted about it, soon remembering there had been numerous other clear (and slightly embarrassing) examples of when my body had slipped into Football Brain autopilot mode. There was the time I’d attempted to jump and head a low-flying pigeon while Christmas shopping with my wife in Manchester a few years back, or when I’d half-volleyed my nan’s house keys down the fruit and veg aisle at Tesco when they dropped from her hand. You know the sort of thing.
Worryingly, I just went to control my 8-month-old son with my right foot as he nearly fell backwards.
— Si Lloyd (@SmnLlyd5) October 4, 2017
Having shared this, I soon came to realise I wasn’t alone. Several people replied saying they’d had similar experiences.
Mostly, they centred around dropping things and that sudden urge – no matter what the object – to try and control them. Rolled up socks, expensive electrical items, even knives…
A friend who’d moved to London told me he constantly fought the need to spin away from the person standing next to him when the doors opened on a crowded tube train, as if trying to lose his marker in the penalty area.
Someone else told me that, when descending switchback stairs, he’d sometimes negotiate the 180° turns between each flight with a Steve Guppy-esque spin.
Another common theme was people seeing formations in everyday situations – the morning commute, for example.
There were many other obscure examples – not least the guy who told me that he sees taking a toilet trip towards the end of a working day as a metaphor for holding the ball up in the corner to waste away the final seconds of a game.
It’s a disturbing image that I’m struggling to get out of my head.
So, as I say, Football Brain is a real thing. It’s the reason many of us can’t look at bus shelters or a couple of closely spaced traffic bollards without imagining them to be a goal, or why we sometimes find ourselves subconsciously arranging ketchup bottles and salt and pepper pots into a formation while waiting on a pub lunch.
It doesn’t matter when or why you stop playing football or at what level you have played it, when you do call it a day, it definitely leaves its mark. Football, no matter how inconvenient it may sometimes be, stays on the brain.
