In my 25 years on this planet, I have come to learn that the things we love most deeply often find us before we know we need them. That is how it was with football for me. Fever Pitch has been on my to-read list for a few years now, but I finally picked it up on a recent trip to England. And yes, that did feel poetic somehow, almost like bringing it home. I haven’t finished it yet, but like any great piece of literature, I already feel like it’s reading me as much as I’m reading it. Every chapter, every anecdote has evoked many comprehensible and incomprehensible thoughts about the game itself, fandom, and fan culture; many of them familiar but ones that I’d never quite managed to articulate.

At its core, Fever Pitch isn’t just about football. It’s about obsession, identity, and how fandom can seep into every corner of a person’s life. Nick Hornby doesn’t structure his memoir around traditional milestones but rather through the prism of matches of his two favorite teams, Arsenal and Cambridge United, that have left a mark on him and that he weaves into moments from his life.

I became a football fan eleven years ago, and much like Hornby, I didn’t ease into it—I plunged in headfirst. It was all-consuming at the time. I cried and threw tantrums over losses, mourned when legendary players left, and structured my weekends around kickoffs (annoying as that was to my friends and family). I recognized that same intensity in Hornby immediately—the way he describes being so engulfed in a match that he barely noticed his then-girlfriend fainting beside him. That kind of devotion does something to you; it is verging on the unhealthy, but it is oh so real.

What struck me most was how Hornby writes about football not as an escape from life, but as a metaphorical container for it—a place to feel things fully. That idea resonated deeply with me. Football did not come into my life to patch up a specific wound (like the author’s parents’ divorce), but once it arrived, it filled a space I hadn’t previously known was empty. It gave shape to my passion for life and everything in it; I knew I had a great capacity to become obsessed with things until I made them part of me, and that is exactly what happened with football too.

There’s a line in the book that made me feel seen on a visceral level: “I have always been accused of taking the things I love—football, of course, but also books and records—much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me.”

I’ve never known how to enjoy things casually. I would get entwined in songs, films, TV shows, books, stories, singers, boy bands, actors, athletes, you name it—never impassively, always uncontrollably. So yes, I have always taken the things that I loved too seriously, parasocially even, so it was natural that the same would happen with football as it found its way into my life. That kind of passion might seem excessive from the outside, but from the inside, for the real fan, it is the most natural thing in the world.

“What I needed more than anything was a place where unfocused unhappiness could thrive, where I could be still and worry and mope: I had the blues, and when I watched my team, I could unwrap them and let them breathe a little,” Hornby writes, depicting the football fan experience so perfectly that it makes my insides ache a little. Football is life, whoops, the character of Dani Rojas from the popular TV show about football, Ted Lasso. And he just might be right. What is life but a weirdly wonderful mix of wins and losses, highs and lows, bitter disappointments, and on-top-of-the-world moments?

So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.

(Hornby in his iconic Fever Pitch)

I have tried numerous times to sit down and coherently write or depict what football means to me and what it has done for me for the past eleven years, but I fail every time. I suspect that is because it is one of those things in my life that is so intrinsically entwined with my sense of self that every time I try to untangle it, it just becomes more enmeshed. I know for sure that I will be a football fan until my very last breath, hopefully in the afterlife too, because who the hell would I be without it?