There is almost nothing worse than really loving something without being sure that other people won’t also like it. We’ve all gone through the horrible anxiety-inducing experience of putting a favourite YouTube clip on for friends and desperately hoping they get it, perhaps interjecting: ‘oh it doesn’t seem very funny at first but you’ll get it as it goes along. Yeah they’re just setting the scene at the moment. Honestly, it does get funny but you have to pay attenti—yeah so like they’re a detective and they’ve just – oh we’ve talked over it, let me just go back and…"

The only thing worse than having very specific tastes that you fear nobody else shares is lacking a very general taste that everyone else does. There is nothing more lonely than realising that everyone else is sharing in some big, broad experience that you are completely out of the loop on, and extremely easy to rationalise that as being something that is Not Really Your Thing.

Yeah I know everyone is watching the Strictly Come Dancing Final, but it’s Not Really My Thing. Yeah I know everyone is talking about Hamilton, but musicals are Not Really My Thing. Yeah I know Game of Thrones is the biggest thing on TV but fantasy is Not Really My Thing. And the bigger the phenomenon it is, the more likely it is that you will make that feeling clear – and the more strongly you will begin to feel that it is Not Your Thing. Personal identity is formed just as much by What You Are not as What You Are Not.

That is not the way round it should be: in an ideal world, we could all handwave away the things we are not into and be passionate about our actual interests. But that is not the way of the world, especially when you are very young. As a child, there are things it’s acceptable to be into and other it is very much not.

It was under these circumstances that I got into football. I was, for a time, skipped ahead a year in primary school, and the principle effect of this way to put me into a group of people that were into football a year before I might naturally have been into football.

I remember volunteering to referee on the playground because it seemed preferable to actually playing, and then realising I didn’t know what decided what differentiated a goal kick decision from the award of a corner kick; in my child’s mind, it came down to whether the ball had gone out of play inside or outside the goal area. This misunderstanding very quickly revealed itself and made me a subject of derision much more speedily than if I had just tried playing and turned out to be shit.

I never got good at football, but I did rapidly become knowledgeable about it, courtesy of a football encyclopedia my football fanatic mother was only to happy to buy for me at the Warrington Cockhedge Centre branch of Wilkinsons, which I can only assume no longer exists.

As a massive nerd I inevitably voraciously devoured that encyclopedia, and within a few months my football credentials could no longer be questioned regardless how fucking awful I remained at actually playing the game. I had been bullied for not knowing about football before, but now I unquestionably knew more than anybody else about the subject.

Never underestimate the drive to be a try-hard smart-arse cunt. That is what I became: in the space of a few weeks, that is what I became. I knew everything about Franz Beckenbauer, about Johan Cruyff and total football and the 1974 World Cup, about stadium disasters and England’s history at major tournaments. My knowledge was all borne out of saying: yeah, I can’t play this game as well as the rest of you, but at least I fucking know who Gary Lineker was, what made him so good, and how he came so close to being England’s greatest-ever goalscorer even though he retired a few years before I actually started watching the game. Get fucked, Andrew Unsworth, you didn’t know any of that shit and I did.

When I decided to try and make that into a professional endeavour as an adult, around 2008, I was driven by the same impulse. That leaves me horribly deficient in certain areas: I can never hope to capture the kind of heart shown by writers like Daniel Storey, who is the very best in the business when it comes to writing with pure passion, and that cuts me up like you wouldn’t believe, because I desperately want to be the master of my craft in every aspect.

But that same drive has led me to be better at analysing areas of the game I had previously felt were weaknesses: tactics, motivation, finances, confidence. Football remains an unintuitive pursuit to me, but I try hard to understand it all and write in a way that conveys something close to what I think the best in the business are capable of.

I still can’t put the amount of heart into my pieces that Storey does, and probably won’t ever be able to; he simply comes at things from an angle that I can’t hope to replicate. But I try extremely hard to do what I can. From the age of about ten I have had a genuine, undeniable love of the game. I would not be able to do this job if I didn’t.

I can only hope that comes across to my readers, and that I’m able to convey what I have been able to pick up over the years in a way that is novel and interesting to my readers. I will get an awful lot wrong, but as time goes on, I should get more right than I get wrong. That is perhaps the best any of us can aspire to achieve, and with a bit of luck, that will prove enough to keep the fans I am writing for satisfied.