Confessions of an Ageing Football Player

Description

Confessions of an Ageing Football Player is a satirical work of fiction in which an ageing man replays the 2014 FIFA World Cup alone, match by match, using his old Subbuteo table, battered figures, and a lifetime of footballing memory.

Although football provides the setting, this is not a sports novel. It is a book about fantasy, masculinity, humiliation, and persistence, and about what happens when the desire to belong to the game outlasts the body, the crowd, and the pitch itself.

The World Cup here is not being played in stadiums.
It is being replayed in private — ritualistically, obsessively, and with complete conviction.

What this book is really about

Football promises belonging, recognition, and shared meaning. For many men, those promises are made early — on school fields and playgrounds — and quietly withdrawn just as early.

By relocating the World Cup to a Subbuteo table, the novel explores:

• how fantasy becomes a form of care

• how repetition replaces progress

• how private ritual stands in for public recognition

• and how play persists long after competition has ended

The book neither mocks nor redeems this impulse. It stays with it.

The story, briefly

Under implausible circumstances, the narrator is called up late to a national squad for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

What follows is a sequence of “matches” that mirror and increasingly distort  real fixtures from the tournament. Players are snapped at the knees. Figures are glued back together. Salamanders wander onto the pitch. Subbuteo rules quietly overrule reality.

Gradually, it becomes clear that the tournament is unfolding on a tabletop, with the narrator alone:

• moving the figures

• keeping the scores

• narrating his own ascent

• and holding the fantasy together through sheer enthusiasm

Victory arrives. So does anticlimax.
The tournament ends. The table remains.

Form and tone

The novel is structured like a football competition – group stages, knock-out rounds, and a final – with each chapter corresponding to a match.

The tone is:

• exuberant

• unreliable

• affectionate and savage in equal measure

• gleefully absurd

Beneath the comedy sits a serious question about who the game is really for, and what remains when participation becomes imaginary.

A final note

This is a book about winning the World Cup without witnesses.

About replaying the match one more time — not to prove anything, but to keep the game alive.

And about what it means to remain a footballer when no one is watching.