The first football cartoon I can remember drawing was in 1984, when I was nine years old. It was the day before the FA Cup final, a Friday school afternoon in May. I don’t recall what the weather was doing, but let’s say it was sunny, for atmosphere. Perhaps sensing an opportunity for a quiet end to the week, my teacher set the class a short assignment: we each had to create an imaginary football club, including team name, badge, kit and players. It was the first season I’d really got into football, but by this stage I was already so obsessed that my parents had begun to gently suggest I might occasionally like to read about, think about or talk about other subjects. This, then, was the perfect creative task for me.

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The lad next to me called his team “Liverpool” and included the Liverpool badge, the Liverpool kit and Liverpool players. Read the brief, mate. Others had been more imaginative, creating a select XI of pop stars or Care Bears or the kids from Fame. I tried for something more memorable.

It was around this time that my friends and I had become vaguely aware of the second world war. We’d yet to be taught about it in school, but had cobbled together a few details from conversations with older kids and snippets of Sunday afternoon war films. We were sketchy on the facts, but knew that Hitler was the baddie and would personally scrap it out with Winston Churchill in dogfights above the British skies, climbing into a Messerschmitt like Darth Vader piloting a TIE Fighter.

Combining these two burgeoning interests, I called my team “The Berlin Burners” and illustrated it with an action shot of Hitler goose-stepping a volley past a diving goalkeeper from distance. The badge included a choice of symbol more commonly seen in newspaper articles about vandalised cemeteries.

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My teacher’s cushy Friday afternoon lay in tatters, as she was now forced to deliver a serious lecture about the evils of the Third Reich. However, some of my classmates found it quite funny, perhaps because it was: a) silly; b) naughty; and c) historically accurate. This wasn’t the exact moment when I decided I wanted to draw cartoons for a living (after all, there’d be little time for it when I was captaining England to World Cup glory, while raising a family with the blonde woman from Heaven 17 who made me anxious when she was on Top of the Pops), but I definitely realised it was a nice feeling.

A less pleasant sensation resulted from one of my first paid jobs as a cartoonist, which was to create a caricature of the permanently angry midfielder Steve McMahon. A series of strange circumstances ended with me standing in a small office with the former Liverpool hard man as he gave me some very direct and robust feedback, which ended with a complaint that I had made him look like the TV magician Paul Daniels. Barely a day passes when I don’t think back to that day burned by the regret of not saying: “So you liked it, but not a lot?” The incident did teach me a valuable lesson, though: don’t go out.

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Some years and several career changes later (none of which involved partnering Alan Shearer in the England attack), making childish drawings about football somehow became a job. Since 2014 I’ve been producing them for my liberal luvvie snowflake comrades at the Guardian, and this book is a collection of some of my favourites.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Following Toni Kroos’s late goal for Germany v Sweden at the 2018 World Cup. Illustration: David Squires/The Guardian

Looking back through them has served as a reminder of quite how much insane stuff has happened in the last four years. Brexit, Trump, Leicester winning the Premier League, Hal Robson-Kanu eviscerating the Belgian defence – and that was just 2016. Some things have remained comfortingly unchanged, though: Fifa is still abominably ridiculous, the most powerful clubs are still driven by an insatiable lust for more, and José Mourinho resolutely remains José Mourinho (although I think I’m getting closer to nailing his likeness, at least; I might even get there by the time he retires).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Fifa is still abominably ridiculous.’ Illustration: David Squires/The Guardian

A lot happens in four years of football. Players and managers come and go (I remain hopeful that a club will take a punt on Harry Redknapp or Tim Sherwood again soon, as they are both fun to draw and have personalities ripe for cartoon material), empires crumble (I would consider sawing off a non-essential body part if it meant Arsène Wenger would return to Arsenal) and new stars and pantomime shitehawks rise to the fore.

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Naturally, my enthusiasm for football has dimmed since that – let’s say sunny – afternoon in 1984. Frankly, it would be a bit strange if my bedroom walls were still decorated with the pictures of Mike Duxbury and Paul Rideout I’d torn out of magazines – you can just print them off now. But while the excesses of the modern game can be dispiriting, what has remained unchanged in the years that I’ve been producing these cartoons is the capacity of the game itself to thrill. When Gareth Bale scored that overhead kick in the 2018 Champions League final, I was every bit as stunned and delighted as that boy whose disrespectful images of history’s greatest monster ruined a primary school teacher’s plans to clear off to the pub early doors.

Goalless Draws by David Squires is published by Guardian Faber at £12.99. To order a copy for £8.99 visit the Guardian Bookshop http://gu.com/goalless