15 things only parents who hate football know
It’s that time of year where the sun is shining, the evenings are long and light – and you're unable to enjoy any of it because your other half is glued to the flippin' football.
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Okay, so we can put up with our resident footie lover watching the occasional high profile match, but being a neglected partner is no fun when the blinkin’ tournament roll around as they last for WEEKS.
When you’re in a relationship with someone whose first love is their football team, there’s no much you can do other than surrender to the inevitable.
How many of these will be happening in your house over the coming weeks?
1 Football screws up the TV schedules
At the end of a long day of child wrangling, all most parents really want to do is collapse on the sofa and find out who’s snogging who in Coronation Street or catch up on the latest crime drama.
But no, it’s been cancelled – because the bloody football is on.
SO unfair.
2 It’s bad when they lose …
Hell hath no fury like someone whose team has just lost. If it's their national team, the fury is x 100.
Expect your footie fan to spend the rest of the evening (actually, make that the rest of the week) drowning their sorrows, muttering under their breath about crap refereeing, texting their mates about the injustice of it all and generally making everyone’s life intolerable.
Misery loves company, after all.
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3 But just as bad when they win
They are drunk and miserable when their team loses, drunk and silly with overexcitement when they win – we’re not sure which is the lesser of the two evils, TBH.
Our advice: pack them off to the pub with their mates so they can relive the glory second by second with them, otherwise you’ll have to feign interest while they talk you through that wonder goal for the 17th time.
4 Children must not be seen OR heard
Be prepared to come up with an endless supply of craft activities and places to take the kids while the footie’s on.
Football is Very. Serious. Business. No interruptions whatsoever will be tolerated, so it’s safer just to ship out with the kids until the match is over.
Especially as you’ll also be protecting them from overhearing all the obscenities that will be hurled at the screen …
5 There are always rows about the telly
Never blithely assumed your football fiend will be willing to sacrifice 10 minutes of a match so your child can watch the CBeebies bedtime story.
It turns out you were wrong. Even if it's a part of your child's bedtime routine that may as well be set in stone, there’s always some dramatic free kick/penalty/sending off incident going on, and there’s no way they can miss even a second.
The result?
A wailing, sleep-refusing toddler and an entirely unapologetic partner who’s so engrossed in the football that they haven't even registered the meltdown unfolding.
6 Family life ceases to exist
When you’re in a relationship with someone who eats, sleeps, and breathes football, unless you love it too you essentially become a single parent when a major tournament is on.
For the foreseeable future, forget any hopes of them making your children a sandwich, running them a bath or – God forbid – taking them to the park.
You’re on your own, kid.
7 They’ll try to buy you off
Don’t be surprised if your partner starts being extra nice to you in the run-up to an important sporting event.
If they're spontaneously bringing home treats, it’s a sure sign that they're trying to buy your silence when they inform you that there’s yet another match on this evening.
And if they suddenly present a BIG gift, you can bet your bottom dollar that they've invited their mates over to watch it.
8 It’s even worse when the kids are obsessed
Having one football addict in the house is bad enough, but if your partner has passed their obsession on to your kids, there’s officially no hope.
Your washing basket overflows with football kit in assorted sizes, there are Match Attax spread all over the kitchen and every conversation revolves around a miracle save, whether Wales deserved to beat Belgium and who’s most likely to win the Golden Boot award.
And if they support different teams, be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
9 Your house gets redecorated
But not in the way you’d like.
Isn’t it funny how you’ve been angling to paint the living room for years and somehow there's never been an opportunity.
Enter into the zone of a major tournament and all of a sudden there are flags draped from the windows, bumper stickers on the car and bunting in your national colours across the garden fence …
10 Everything revolves around the footie schedule
It doesn’t matter what’s on the calendar or how long it’s been there, everything has to move aside to make way for the football – whether it’s a family BBQ, a day out with friends or even your own child’s birthday party.
And if it’s something that simply can’t be rearranged – a wedding, for example – your partner will be twitching for the duration, nervously checking their phone and wondering if they can sneak out to find the nearest pub with Sky.
11 Grown adults turn into big kids
Even if the extent of your footie fan's usual exercise regime is walking to the kitchen to get cuppa, they think they’re Lionel Messi when a football tournament is on.
Half-size goalposts will appear in your garden.
The lawn will be torn up by their free kick practice.
And chances are you’ll end up carting them off to A&E with a torn knee ligament.
12 You can get them to agree to anything
One advantage of your selective football deafness is that a footie fan with grunt their agreement to anything and everything you ask without even hearing it.
Whatever’s on your wish list – a holiday to the Maldives, a puppy – now’s the time to ask for it.
Just make sure your phone is set to record as proof. They'll have no recollection of the conversation, otherwise.
13 It’s never just the match
If ‘watching the football’ simply meant the 90 minutes of gameplay, you could just about live with it.
But it’s never just the match itself, is it?
First there’s the pre-match build-up, then the half-time analysis, then the post-mortem, the highlights later in the evening, the draw for the next round …
Thank goodness we can now watch Netflix on our iPads. How did neglected partners survive in the days before live streaming?
