27^th May 2028

The first time I travelled to a football match, I left before dawn with a paper atlas folded awkwardly across the passenger seat and no real idea what waited at the other end of the interstate. Every mile belonged to me. If I saw an interesting diner, I stopped. If somebody in a gas station recommended a scenic detour, I took it. Deadlines existed, of course, but they were generous enough to leave room for curiosity, and curiosity was usually rewarded. Somewhere between Kansas and the Gulf Coast I discovered that the roads themselves had become the assignment.

Loudoun, Virginia, was the first place I visited without really visiting at all.

The journey began at Miami International Airport before sunrise, a place that seemed determined to remind travellers that efficiency and romance rarely occupy the same departure lounge. Two and a half hours later we landed at Dulles, where the team coach waited beside the terminal before carrying us the final twenty minutes towards Leesburg. Looking out through the tinted windows, I caught brief glimpses of office parks, immaculate housing developments and wide commuter roads disappearing towards Washington, but they passed too quickly to become anything more than scenery. Nobody suggested stopping for coffee. Nobody wondered whether there might be a worthwhile bookstore just off the next exit. We were travelling with purpose now, and purpose keeps remarkably strict time.

I found myself sitting beside one of the club physiotherapists for most of the flight, and somewhere over the Carolinas our conversation drifted away from football injuries and into the quieter realities of football lives. He spoke about watching young academy players leave home for the first time, about the difficulty of helping older professionals accept that their bodies no longer recovered as quickly as their minds expected, and about the strange sadness of changing clubs every few years without ever really changing your profession. I’d spent years interviewing players about careers. It had never occurred to me that the staff travelled through exactly the same uncertainties. Football clubs, I realised somewhere above the clouds, aren’t simply collections of footballers. They’re collections of people whose working lives happen to revolve around football.

The hotel might have stood almost anywhere in America. Beige walls, identical corridors and carpets designed not to offend anybody. Breakfast consisted of industrial coffee, unlimited waffles, fruit, Gatorade and enough protein to satisfy a squad preparing for ninety minutes of running, yet I couldn’t help smiling at how efficiently the entire operation moved around me. Lunch became dinner, dinner became preparation, and preparation became routine. Gone were seafood restaurants overlooking harbours, roadside barbecue trailers and waitresses eager to explain the local speciality. Tonight everyone ate the same pasta or rice, the same grilled chicken, the same vegetables. High performance leaves surprisingly little room for seasoning.

By the time we reached the stadium, I realised I had no real sense of Loudoun at all.

There had been no wandering through neighbourhoods, no conversations with bartenders or taxi drivers, no slow discoveries that gradually stitched a place together in my imagination. I collected my media accreditation, slung two cameras across my shoulders and followed the players through corridors that could have belonged to almost any modern stadium. Somewhere in my backpack, the old spiral notebook travelled with me as faithfully as it always had. During a quiet moment before kick-off I opened it, wrote “Loudoun – AWAY” across the top of a fresh page, then stared at the empty space beneath the title until someone called my name. When I looked again after full-time, the page remained blank.

That empty page bothered me more than the draw itself.

Not because I’d forgotten how to write, but because there had been so little opportunity to observe anything beyond the football. For years I’d believed the game was merely the excuse that allowed me to discover towns I might otherwise never have visited. This time the football consumed everything around it. I photographed the warm-ups, filmed the arrival of the starting eleven, followed the coaching staff towards the dugout and spent the evening documenting a match instead of absorbing the place hosting it. It wasn’t worse. In many ways it was exciting, professional and endlessly absorbing. It was simply different.

The return flight left late enough that most of the squad slept before we had climbed above the first layer of cloud. I intended to organise photographs on my laptop, perhaps begin tomorrow’s social media schedule, but somewhere over Georgia I closed the screen and drifted off instead. There would be no late-night interstate, no roadside coffee cooling beside the gearstick, no sunrise gradually replacing darkness somewhere beyond the windscreen. By the time I opened my eyes again, the lights of Miami shimmered beneath us like another fixture already waiting to begin.

For years I’d been collecting places one notebook at a time.

Somewhere between Charleston and Loudoun I’d stopped travelling through football and started travelling with it.

I wasn’t sure which version of me I’d miss more.