ABSTRACT
The invariant with regard to the inauguration of football in anyone’s life is variation, diversity. But the point of all this is to draw attention to the fact that, almost without exception, anyone who has even a passing interest in the game will at some point or other in their lives have played, will have tapped a ball around in some shape or form, somehow, somewhere. In other words they will know something of the enjoyment that playing football offers, and in its way an offer of an enjoyment in the pleasures of recall, as if nostalgia is at the heart of the project. For so many football seems caught up in precisely this. In other words something returns us to it over and over again in an intensely agonising insistence: it is the form or one of the forms of our enjoyment. An enjoyment that is informed by certain madness has a special quality.
