I have watched thousands of football matches. I have played hundreds of them, mostly badly. I have coached teenagers who trust me with a whistle for reasons I still find touching and slightly alarming. And for a long time, I did all of this without actually seeing the sport I was obsessed with.

This book is what happened next — a slow, frequently humbling education as a fan, a player, a coach, and finally someone who's stopped expecting a tidy answer to "What's the correct way to play this game?" Along the way: a Barcelona pub, a Hungarian coaching lineage nobody warned Brazil about, and a grandfather with an unverifiable theory about Diego Maradona's bootlaces.

Not a tactics manual. Not quite a memoir. Just one honest, occasionally hilarious attempt to finally see a game I never once stopped loving.

The laces stay half-tied. That's rather the point.