Musings From The Shitter: Volume Twenty Five

A Load of Blokes Running Around Pretending It Matters—and It Does

Right, so here we are: another football season over. And not in some glorious, champagne-soaked, Instagrammable way. No last-minute winner, no emotional huddle, no tearful speeches or cameras following us around like it’s Welcome to Wrexham. No. It ended like most things do in real life: anticlimactically, and probably with someone complaining about parking.

No one stormed off. No one cried. We just… sort of stopped.

You’d expect, or at least hope, that the end of a season might bring some kind of emotional payoff—triumph, heartbreak, closure, something to justify all the effort and hamstring pain. But instead, you find yourself sat in your car after the final match (which may or may not have even been an actual match—ours got cancelled), peeling off your shin pads like a war veteran and realising: “Oh. That’s it then.”

Silence. Damp kit. Slight groin pain. Existential dread.

Now, to be clear, we didn’t lose the title on the last day or suffer a cruel twist of fate like something out of a sports documentary. We were just… out of the running. Weeks ago. We fizzled. Like a budget firework. The last few games had all the urgency of a supermarket run. No tension. No stakes. Just bodies turning up out of habit and a vague sense of loyalty. But—here’s the thing—we did turn up. And honestly, that might be the most impressive part.

Because there’s a weird sort of nobility in that, isn’t there? Showing up when there’s nothing on the line. No glory, no trophies, not even the chance to ruin someone else’s season. Just 11 blokes, groaning through warmups on uneven grass, pretending they stretched at home.

It’s stupid. It’s beautiful.

And yeah, I know: culture. That’s the word people like to use in these moments. Except now it means almost nothing. You hear it in boardrooms and brand pitches, usually said by someone wearing a lanyard and white sneakers, trying to sell you something you don’t need. But what we had wasn’t “culture” in that corporate, laminated-poster-on-the-wall sense.

No, what we had was the sort of unspoken bond that forms when a group of men collectively agree to suspend adulthood for ten hours a week and chase a ball around like toddlers with slightly better coordination and much worse knees.

It’s in the way someone still brings tape, when we all forgot to buy our own. It’s in the playlist that hasn’t changed in three years, and somehow still includes Rage Against The Machine. It’s in the same three blokes arriving late, every week, with the same excuses that stopped being funny years ago—but we still laugh anyway.

That’s the real stuff. The in-between bits.

No one talks about the in-between bits. Not in match reports, not in highlight reels, not in the pub when you’re dissecting tactics like you’re Pep Guardiola with a hangover. But that’s where it all lives. The glances before a corner. The shrugged apology after a terrible pass. The inside jokes that only make sense after months of shared Thursdays and Saturdays and rain delays and tactical disasters.

That’s the bit I miss.

Not the goals. Not the stats. Not the league table. I miss us. The version of us that only exists in this odd little micro-universe. One where being a dad, a manager, a stressed-out adult vanishes for 90 minutes, and you’re just a bloke in boots again. Sweating. Swearing. Laughing at nothing.

And yeah, fine—there were some absolute stinkers this season. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Games so bad you almost wanted to apologise to the grass. Passes that defied physics in how wrong they were. Hangovers so aggressive they felt like punishment from a vengeful god. . Some didn’t even bother warming up. One of us did something they’ve never done before…missed a penalty. But somehow, it all mattered.

Because even when it didn’t matter in the traditional “win/lose” sense—it did matter. To us. And to the handful of supporters who turned up week in, week out, rain or shine. People who knew the players by name. People who celebrated our mediocre successes like they were cup finals. People who cared because we cared.

And that’s the bit people don’t get. It’s easy to write off amateur sport as some midlife crisis hobby—lads playing dress-up, pretending it still matters. But that’s bollocks. It does matter. Not in the way people think. Not because we’re destined for glory or scouts are watching (they’re not, let’s be honest, we're old). But because this is where some of us feel most us.

It’s therapy. It’s connection. It’s a ritual. It’s a break from the never-ending carousel of modern life where everything is monetised, optimised, and painfully, soul-suckingly serious. On this field, we get to be idiots. Glorious, loyal, stupid, determined idiots.

So yeah—no trophy this year. No dramatic finale. Just echoes. Ghosts of conversations, muscle memory, mud still caked on boots no one’s bothered to clean. And this weird, aching absence on Saturday afternoons, like something’s off and you can’t quite name it.

Maybe that’s the definition of culture that’s actually useful. Not some bullet point in a HR slide deck. But this: a version of yourself that only exists in the context of something bigger than you. A version that disappears when the group dissolves, and leaves behind a shape only you can feel.

You miss it, but you don’t say it out loud because that would sound needy or sentimental or soft. So instead, you send a gif in the group chat. Or you drop by the pitch next week just to “see what’s going on.” Or you clean your boots—finally—because you’re not ready to let go just yet.

It wasn’t a fairytale season.

But it was ours.

And it was real.

And that’s probably better, in the end.