Spangleyed

August always feels more like the start of a new year to me than January. This year it’s been harder than usual to sense it coming. We’ve had heatwave after heatwave, weeks when it’s felt far hotter than a British summer has any right to, and even now summer doesn’t seem quite ready to leave. The Met Office figures suggest that isn’t just my imagination. But the nights are drawing in, holidays are mostly done, and normal life is beginning again. And, more importantly, so is the football.

Not that we’ve exactly been short of football this summer. There was a World Cup, which normally makes the gap between seasons much easier — a few weeks when there’s football almost every day, but without the usual anxiety of watching my teams. I enjoyed plenty of it, although it was increasingly difficult to separate the football from Gianni Infantino. His extraordinary closeness to Donald Trump had already bothered me, and then Trump actually rang him during the tournament to complain about the suspension of US striker Folarin Balogun. Balogun was subsequently allowed to play, although FIFA insisted the disciplinary decision had been made independently. The whole thing stank.

Almost as soon as the World Cup finished, Infantino was then at the centre of another enormous row over a plan to sell a stake in FIFA’s future commercial rights to private investors — a scheme FIFA eventually abandoned after a furious backlash. By the end of the summer, football associations were openly calling for him to go. I’ve disliked plenty of football administrators over the years, but Infantino is in a class of his own.

Still, a World Cup isn’t the same as the season starting. By August I’m ready to go again. And somehow I’m optimistic. Every year. A couple of players arrive, someone looks good in pre-season, and I start to think this might be the year it all comes together. The teams I follow have tested that optimism pretty thoroughly over the past decade — false starts, expensive mistakes, and enough new eras to make the announcement of another one feel more like a threat than a promise. But when the first game comes around, none of it matters. I’m back.

Perhaps it’s the reset I like. Whatever happened last season has gone, and everyone starts again on zero points. The fixtures are in the calendar — Saturday at three, Sunday afternoon, Monday night, or whatever other time the television companies have decided we’re playing — and a whole season stretches ahead. I still miss the simplicity of most games kicking off at three on a Saturday and being done by five, but that particular feature of football appears to have gone for good. You can see the difficult runs, the derbies, Christmas, and the long haul towards May, but none of it has happened yet. For a few days, at least, nothing has gone wrong.

That’s probably why August feels like a beginning. January arrives halfway through everything, in the middle of winter with the decorations barely put away. Football is much neater. One season ends, there’s a pause — World Cup or not — and then we start again.

So here we are. Another season, a few new players, and the completely unreasonable belief that this time it might all work out.

Ask me in October.