My son is eight years old and obsessed with football.
This should not be remarkable. We live in Brazil.
Here, football is the national religion. Boys arrive home from the maternity ward in club shirts. Grandparents buy footballs before they buy books. Entire family trees are organised around rivalries.
The strange part is not my son. It's me.
I know almost nothing about football.
I grew up in England — a country every bit as obsessed with the game — and somehow it missed me completely.
My father once took me to Aston Villa when I was about nine. Not just into the stadium, but into the players' lounge afterwards. We met the players. I collected autographs. I came home with a signed programme, and my friends at school couldn't believe it.
The problem was that I didn't know who any of the players were. The signed programme meant nothing to me.
Part of the reason the game never really took hold in me, I think, is that one of my earliest memories of it is fear.
I was a teenager, on a train from London to Birmingham, in a carriage packed with Millwall supporters travelling to an away match. More than thirty years later, it remains one of the most intimidating experiences of my life.
The police were waiting at station after station. The train would stop, officers would board, shouting would erupt, and men would be dragged out onto the platform. Then the doors would close, we would move on, and at the next station the whole thing seemed to begin again.
I didn't understand what was happening. I only knew that I was frightened — not nervous, not uncomfortable, but genuinely afraid. There was nowhere to go and no way off. Just a carriage full of angry men and a teenager wishing he were anywhere else.
At some point an older supporter noticed me and my friends. He seemed to be someone the others deferred to. He waved us over and told us to sit near him. "You'll be alright here." And we were. Nobody bothered us; anyone who came too close was told to move along.
The man who made me feel safest on that train was also part of the crowd that frightened me most. I've never forgotten that contradiction. But I've never quite forgotten the fear, either.
For years afterwards, football felt less like a sport than like a world I didn't understand — tribal, unpredictable, occasionally dangerous. While other boys dreamed of cup finals and packed stadiums, I drifted the other way.
While everyone else talked about football, I was obsessed with rugby. I knew every player, every rivalry, every result. My heroes weren't footballers. They were men like Jonah Lomu, Martin Johnson and Jeremy Guscott — stories of physicality and resilience. I was probably the only boy in my school who cared more about the scrum than the score.
And now, twenty-five years later, I find myself living in Brazil with an eight-year-old son obsessed with a game I barely understand.
He is running headlong towards the very thing I spent most of my life keeping at arm's length. When he talks about going to a big match one day, some part of me still pictures that train — I know the game has changed, I know millions of families fill stadiums every weekend without trouble, but childhood fear has a habit of outliving the facts.
His uncles started it. Before he could decide anything for himself, they had already christened him a supporter of Cruzeiro Esporte Clube. Shirts. Backpacks. Water bottles. Every birthday seemed to produce another piece of Cruzeiro merchandise. The cultural programming had begun.
The trouble is that my son has developed opinions.
"Cruzeiro lose too much," he informed me recently.
His current loyalty belongs to Al Nassr — not for history, not for geography, not for identity, but for Cristiano Ronaldo. Which is exactly how an eight-year-old should choose a team.
Adults inherit loyalty. Children follow heroes.
Recently his club ran a World Cup tournament. He desperately wanted to be Portugal. When he was assigned England instead, he cried. Actual tears. Portugal had Ronaldo. England did not.
Or so he thought.
I tried showing him videos of David Beckham. He looked at the screen and dismissed him at once. "I don't want to watch this old bacon guy."
Old bacon guy. One of England's greatest players, reduced to a slice of processed breakfast meat.
Then something unexpected happened. England won the tournament. My son was on the winning team.
Suddenly Beckham wasn't so bad. The free kick from the halfway line became fascinating. England became interesting. Now he wants to complete the England page in his sticker album.
Identity, it turns out, can change very quickly when you're eight.
Watching all this, I've realised football isn't really what interests me. What interests me is belonging.
There's a reason a game can carry so much of it. The historian Eric Hobsbawm once observed that a nation of millions becomes more real as a team of "eleven named people"1 — that the abstract idea of a country suddenly feels solid the moment it pulls on a shirt and runs onto a pitch. Benedict Anderson called the nation an imagined community2: something far too large to ever be experienced directly, held together only by the stories and symbols we agree to share. A national team is one of those symbols. When my son cried over a tournament, he wasn't really crying about football. He was negotiating which imagined community he belonged to.
And he is, unmistakably, Brazilian. Not legally. Not on paper. But culturally, completely. He was born here. He speaks Portuguese like the native he is. His friends are Brazilian. His references are Brazilian. Football is simply one more thread in an identity forming in front of me.
And yet I wonder what pieces of England he will inherit. Not because I need him to be English, but because I want him to understand where half of him came from.
The difficulty is that the two countries teach very different lessons through the game.
Brazil teaches that football should be beautiful. Joyful. Creative. A dribble is celebrated. A nutmeg becomes a story. Skill is admired for its own sake.
England teaches something else. England teaches hope — more precisely, hope in defiance of the evidence. The famous phrase isn't really "it's coming home." The phrase is that we keep saying it's coming home. Every tournament. Every generation. Every near miss. Years of hurt, followed by another year of hurt, followed, somehow, by optimism.
There is something profoundly British in that.
But here is the part I find strangest of all — the part I notice when the two of us are on the sofa with a match on the television. My son is not inheriting the England I grew up with.
I grew up with England as football's great underachiever: a country that talked endlessly about 1966 because there was so little else to talk about. Every tournament seemed to end the same way — penalties, heartbreak, and a promise that next time would be different. To support England was to rehearse disappointment and call it loyalty.
His England is a different country. His England reaches semi-finals. His England reaches finals. His England walks into tournaments expecting to compete. When he watches them, he doesn't see decades of failure; he sees Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham and Bukayo Saka, and a team that might actually win.
And at the very same time, he is growing up in a Brazil that has not lifted a World Cup since 2002. For the first time in my life, there are Brazilian children — my son among them — who have never once seen their country crowned champions of the world. The five stars are still there on the shirt, but for his generation they belong to history rather than to memory. He has inherited the legend of Brazilian football without ever watching it come true.
So he is taking on two national stories at strange moments in each. An England that has grown hopeful precisely because it keeps getting closer. A Brazil that stays confident on the strength of what it once was. One nation lives on expectation; the other lives on memory. And somewhere between the two, in front of a television in São Paulo, an eight-year-old is quietly deciding who he wants to be.
What I can't hand him is the older, sadder English habit — convincing yourself that this, finally, is the year, only to watch it go on penalties.
Maybe that can't be taught. Maybe it can only be lived. One day he will support England in a tournament. One day they will lose in spectacular fashion. Perhaps that will be his initiation.
What makes all of this stranger is that I'm learning football at the same time he is. Most fathers pass knowledge down. I'm trying to acquire it in parallel. I've started watching documentaries. I've started playing five-a-side with the other dads. I've even considered lessons — at forty-six.
Not because I've fallen in love with football. Because he has.
I still catch myself shouting rugby at him from the touchline. "Dominate the contact!" "Win the collision!" The football coaches look mildly concerned. They're teaching passing angles and movement; I'm preparing him for a breakdown at Twickenham.
But maybe there's something in the clash. Rugby gave me discipline, resilience, a certain physical courage. Brazilian football seems to teach improvisation, creativity, confidence. Maybe the goal isn't to choose. Maybe it's both. English grit and Brazilian flair. A boy who can play beautifully but doesn't fall apart when things get hard.
The older he gets, the more I suspect he won't turn out exactly English or exactly Brazilian. He'll be something in between — something else.
Psychologists have a name for it. When people hold on to both cultures at once rather than surrendering one — what John Berry3 and Verónica Benet-Martínez call being bicultural — the ones most at ease stop treating their two halves as a contradiction to be resolved, and start describing themselves as a kind of third, emerging culture: not one thing or the other, but a new thing made of both.4
That, I think, is what I'm watching being built. A boy who supports a Brazilian club and follows the Premier League. Who loves Brazilian skill and admires English history. Who feels at home in both places, and belongs fully to a third that is simply himself.
I moved to Brazil believing I'd teach my son about identity. Instead, he's teaching me — that it isn't something a parent hands down but something a child builds. And one day, perhaps, he'll be the one explaining football to his father. Which would be fitting.