“If you ask me what my life will look like a few years from now, where I will be, what I will be doing–the honest answer is, I don’t know. But, I do know that I’ll still have football, I’ll have Arsenal, I’ll have a football family that just keeps growing, and we will all still have the shared currency of the beautiful game to connect us no matter what separates us. It’s the longest love story of my life and I couldn’t be more excited to see where it takes me next.”
I wrote these lines a few years ago concluding an essay for Unusual Efforts.
“You may come for the sport, but more often than not you stay for the people,” I also wrote.
Dave Seager is firmly in that camp. A Gooner friend that I’ve known for a decade, first online, then offline, who’s now like family.
A year on from the above essay, I wrote another for them that discussed the transformation of my relationship with the beautiful game and with the club that had adopted me as its own even before I realised it. Any long-term relationship will change and grow as the two participating entities do, like football allegiance and the love of the game. For the first time since becoming a Gooner, I was having to contend with that reality. A part of that is spells of feeling detached, of being disillusioned with where (especially the modern) game is headed, is already knee-deep in. We’ve all been there. The past two years more than any other. Many of us might still be there, others popping in and out as the fortunes of our clubs ebb and flow.