There are places that seem to have been designed for the telling of stories, and Venice, with its narrow passages and improbable doorways, its water moving beneath the houses and its streets that lead a man nowhere in particular, has always struck me as one of them. It is a city that makes a performance of being elsewhere. You arrive expecting to find something, although what that something might be is seldom clear, and after a few days you begin to understand that you are still the same person who arrived, carrying the same disappointments and unfinished business, only now you are carrying them along canals instead of highways. I had been in Florida long enough to recognise the feeling.

Eighteen months had passed since I last saw Tomás Villalba, and I had exchanged Miami FC for a television job covering Inter Miami and Major League Soccer. It was the sort of opportunity I had once imagined wanting, but the game looked different from a studio. There were matches to explain, opinions to prepare and an audience to address, and I had begun to miss the simpler business of watching football without having to decide what it meant.

Tomás called while I was on holiday in Venice. He had taken a day away from pre-season training, he told me, and would be in the city for a few days before returning to Venezia. In the intervening year, he had guided the club to Serie A with a record-breaking season. I had followed the campaign from across the Atlantic, pleased by his success and curious about what it might have cost him. We briefly considered a gondola, before agreeing that neither of us wanted to spend an afternoon participating in someone else’s idea of Venice. Instead, we settled on a quiet café beside the water, tucked away from the streets where the city performed for its visitors.

He arrived on foot, dressed plainly, without the tracksuit and purposeful stride I associated with him. We embraced, ordered coffee and began with the usual exchanges about travel, work and people we had known in America. For a while, it felt as though the intervening year had been a short administrative delay in a conversation we had never quite finished. Then the coffee arrived, and we began to talk about what had happened.

Venezia had given him everything a manager might reasonably ask for: promotion, recognition, money and the prospect of competing among Italy’s best. Yet Tomás spoke about these things without much satisfaction. The meetings multiplied, the expectations grew, and football seemed increasingly buried beneath the business surrounding it. He missed America, he missed his family back home, and he missed the ordinary closeness of a club where the relationship between players, supporters and manager had felt less like a professional arrangement and more like a shared undertaking.

He wasn’t talking about quitting. There was a season to prepare for, a club that had trusted him and supporters who had every reason to believe in him. But when I asked what he wanted next, he had no answer. I understood more than I cared to admit. Television had given me security and a professional standing I had spent years trying to establish, but there were mornings when I missed the training grounds, the unguarded conversations and the feeling that I was getting closer to the game rather than explaining it from a distance. We had both arrived somewhere we had once wanted to be, and neither of us seemed entirely certain what to do with the view. The afternoon passed. We spoke about players, old friends and the small details of football that could still bring the familiar enthusiasm into Tomás’s voice. The interest remained; it was the life built around it that had become difficult to bear. Eventually, we walked along the waterfront, past restaurants laying their tables and boats moving through the late light. There was no grand farewell, only the usual assurances that we would speak again, and the practical business of two men returning to separate lives.

I watched him disappear into the crowd before turning towards my hotel.

Seven years later, I would travel back to Europe, towards a tiny village in Switzerland whose name meant very little to me when I first set out. I would arrive tired of television, tired of the distance I had placed between myself and the game, and uncertain whether there was anything left worth writing about. Somewhere in that village, among people for whom football remained a matter of belonging rather than ambition, I would find my way back to both. I could not have known it that afternoon in Venice. All I knew was that an old friend was returning to work, I was returning to Florida, and neither of us had quite found what we had been looking for.

I have a photograph from that day: two men sitting at a waterfront café, an empty table between them and the canal behind. The framing is careless, the light uneven, and neither of us appears to be posing. It is not a particularly good photograph, but I have kept it all these years.

Sometimes, the end of a story is simply two men sitting together, knowing that the road goes on, even when neither can see where it leads.