Men making friends with other men is hard. It usually involves a weird bullfight stand-off where both of you try to feel each other out—shaking hands a little too firmly, unsure whether obscure references to late-nineties WWE storylines will go down a treat or crash the momentum of the friendship like a cement-filled zeppelin. It’s even harder to make friends with a man when you’re sleeping with their daughter. That tends to put up a bit of a barrier. It creates a splash of friction. One of the things that has brought me and my girlfriend’s dad closer together, though, is football—specifically, the painfully non-fluent, violently uncreative brand of football played by West Ham United.
We’re both lifelong fans of the Irons, and watching games together—whether on the television or at the London Stadium, nestled next to tourists shovelling popcorn into their mouths—has become a meaningful way for us to connect. It’s something we’ve got in common outside of my relationship with his daughter. Forming that relationship with him, which has slowly but steadily turned into a friendship where we’ll text each other messages like ‘LOP OUT, POTTER IN’ or swap Spurs memes, exemplifies what I love the most about football. On the surface, it’s just a silly game played by overpaid athletes that doesn’t mean anything. But it’s a game that’s brought me closer, on an emotional level, with more strangers than I can care to count. And that does mean something.
Lucas Oakeley
From personal experience, finding that shared interest with your in-law doesn’t happen often. The “man of the house” cliché is something I think most men in serious relationships have encountered at least once in their lives. There’s a reason, after all, that films like Meet The Parents and Father Of The Bride get made. And there’s a reason those films made so much money: they both spawned god-awful sequels. If I had to guess, I’d say the friction between a man and the father of the person he’s dating stems from some guttural animosity leftover from when we were primates. You know, back in the days when all of us were running around on all fours, and the only important things in life were mating and not getting eaten.
With West Ham in the mix, though, we’re able to have long-winded, passionate conversations about something that’s not my girlfriend or how she’s doing, which is kind of like passing the father and future-son-in-law version of the Bechdel test. We’re not necessarily talking about our feelings, but we’re also not not talking about our feelings at the game, either. Being able to answer the question, “Did you see the game last night?” is integral to male bonding. Football is a bedrock on which you can build a friendship—or, at the very least, a shallow sports-based simulacrum of one—with most men in the country.
You can talk about McGeady spins and the merits of a Gegenpress with a stranger at the urinal, with your girlfriend’s best friend’s new boyfriend who has hands the size of dinner plates, and even with your late-night Uber driver without fear of the conversation ever edging into how your mental health is. But you can also use the ninety minutes, plus the time it takes to sink a swift half-time pint, to open up.
