Prologue

I had stopped writing long before I admitted it to myself, although if anyone had asked, I would have pointed to the bylines as evidence that nothing had really changed. The pieces were still being filed on time, still edited into shape, still published in places that carried just enough weight to make the whole thing look intact from the outside. But somewhere between the airports and the anonymous hotel rooms, between deadlines that arrived too quickly and stories that never seemed to linger, the sentences had begun to flatten into something functional rather than meaningful. They moved cleanly from one point to the next, they satisfied the brief, they filled the space they were supposed to fill, but they no longer carried any sense of discovery or risk. I wasn’t writing towards anything anymore, and eventually I realised I wasn’t even writing through anything either, which felt worse.

Leaving didn’t feel like a decision so much as a quiet drift away from something I could no longer justify holding onto. There was no resignation letter, no final column that tried to dress the moment up as something reflective or complete, and no conversation that gave it the kind of shape people expect when someone steps away from a career. I simply stopped saying yes, allowed the emails to go unanswered for long enough that silence began to feel intentional, and then booked a flight to Spain on a morning that had nothing particularly significant about it. If I had been pressed on the reason, I would probably have said something about needing distance or perspective, but the truth was closer to uncertainty than clarity. Spain just happened to be the first place that felt far enough away from what I had been doing, and close enough to something I remembered once enjoying.

I told myself, more than once, that it wasn’t about football, although I never really believed that explanation held up under any kind of scrutiny. Football had always been the easiest way into a place for me, the quickest way to understand how people chose to express themselves when something mattered but couldn’t be controlled. In Spain, that feeling came back to me in fragments rather than in anything complete or sustained. I moved without much direction, spending a few days in Madrid before drifting north through smaller cities and towns I hadn’t planned to visit, watching matches in bars where the commentary blurred into rhythm rather than meaning. I found myself paying attention to the way rooms shifted collectively, the way anticipation could travel across a space without needing to be explained, and I wrote those observations down without any real sense of what they were for.

Germany felt different almost immediately, as though the edges of everything had been sharpened just enough to remove the ambiguity I had been leaning into. The stadiums were larger, the atmospheres louder, but there was a kind of order to it all that made the experience feel contained rather than expansive. I tried to write properly again while I was there, convincing myself that structure might be the thing I needed to reconnect with whatever I had lost, and I managed to file two pieces that read well enough on the surface. One of them was published, the other disappeared into the quiet space where unused work tends to go, and neither of them left any real impression on me once they were finished. It wasn’t that they were bad, or even that they were empty, but they felt interchangeable with things I had written months earlier, which was the problem I had been trying to escape in the first place.

By the time I crossed into Switzerland, I had stopped thinking of the trip in terms of progression and started to treat it more like a continuation of something I hadn’t yet defined. The train carried me into Graubünden through landscapes that felt almost exaggerated in their scale, as though they had been designed to impose a kind of stillness on anyone passing through them. The mountains seemed less like scenery and more like boundaries, and the villages that appeared between them carried a sense of permanence that made movement feel almost unnecessary. I noticed that I had begun to slow down without consciously deciding to, staying in places a little longer, walking without the need to reach a particular destination, and allowing time to pass without trying to measure it against anything productive.

I got off the train in Chur for reasons that, at the time, felt entirely practical and have since taken on more significance than they probably deserve. It was late enough in the day that continuing on seemed unnecessary, and early enough that I could still convince myself I was making a choice rather than settling for convenience. The town was smaller than I expected, although it carried itself with a kind of quiet assurance that made the scale feel intentional rather than limiting. The streets didn’t seem to follow a plan so much as they reflected a long process of adjustment, and the buildings held onto their age without presenting it as something to be admired.

I had no particular reason to expect that football would find its way back into the centre of my attention while I was there, and when it did, it arrived in a way that was easy to ignore. It wasn’t a single conversation or a moment that stood out as significant, but rather a pattern that revealed itself gradually as I moved through the same spaces more than once. I began to hear the name repeated in passing, attached to results, to complaints, to small moments of humour that seemed to carry more weight than the words themselves. There was something about the tone that caught my attention, a mixture of frustration and belief that didn’t quite settle into either, and I wrote the word down almost automatically, as though it might belong to something later.

If I had been more certain of myself at the time, I might have recognised that as the beginning of a story, but certainty was not something I had been working with for a while. The notebook I was carrying already held dozens of similar entries, words and phrases that had seemed briefly important before dissolving into the background of everything else I had collected. Still, there was something about the repetition that made it harder to dismiss, and I found myself walking towards the edge of the town the next day with the vague intention of seeing what it referred to. The ground was smaller than I expected, positioned in a way that made it feel integrated into the landscape rather than set apart from it, and there was nothing immediately striking about it from a distance.

What held my attention were the details that didn’t quite align with that modest first impression, the small indications that the place carried more significance than it appeared to. There were scarves visible through windows that faced the street, conversations that lingered just long enough to suggest they were about more than the immediate result, and a general sense that the club occupied a space in the town that extended beyond the matches themselves. I watched a training session the following day without being challenged or acknowledged, standing at a distance that allowed me to observe without feeling intrusive. The players moved with a level of coordination that suggested familiarity with what was being asked of them, even when execution faltered, and the coach – Iñaki Arriola – carried himself with a controlled intensity that didn’t rely on volume to assert itself.

There was nothing about it that demanded to be written about in the way I had once understood stories to work, no obvious hook or dramatic tension that could be shaped into something immediate. And yet, when I returned to where I was staying that evening, I found myself writing again in a way that felt different to what I had been doing in the weeks before. The sentences were less certain, less polished, but they seemed to be searching for something rather than simply arriving at it. I wasn’t thinking about publication, or structure, or even coherence in any meaningful sense, and that absence of expectation allowed the process to feel closer to what I remembered writing being when I had first started.

I told myself I would stay a few more days, partly out of convenience and partly out of a growing sense that leaving immediately would feel premature. Those few days extended without much resistance into something longer, and the idea of continuing the journey in the way I had originally imagined began to lose its appeal. I became more attentive to the rhythms of the town, to the way football seemed to intersect with everyday life in ways that were subtle but persistent, and to the possibility that there was something here that required time rather than distance to understand. The uncertainty that had followed me from place to place began to shift into something more focused, not resolved, but directed.

I would like to say that I recognised the significance of that shift as it was happening, that I understood I had found the beginning of something worth committing to, but that would impose a clarity on the moment that didn’t exist. What I felt instead was a gradual movement towards engagement, a willingness to remain present with something that hadn’t yet explained itself. It wasn’t a story in the way I had been trained to identify them, and it didn’t offer any guarantees that it would become one. But it held my attention in a way that nothing else had for some time, and that was enough to make me stay.