My return to life as a football parent — for my son, aged 25

Times

28-04-2025

I had not watched Conor, my youngest son, play football for seven years until now.
What a neglectful parent, you might be thinking, but I suspect there are many of you in the same boat. I stopped when he was 17 because, well, that felt about right. At some point it becomes embarrassing for a young man to see his mother on the touchline or, worse, hear her yelling at one of his team-mates to get back onside.
Lately I have been wondering about the whole parenting malarkey and whether or not I took it all far too seriously, and made the mistake of suggesting this out loud.
'You think?' Conor, 25, said.
Still, there was a chance of redemption at the London FA Sunday Junior Shield Cup Final. This was an actual final and so Conor said that spectators, and that included his mother, were more than welcome. His team, Venezia Dons, were the official underdogs — it even said so in the match programme — and needed all the support they could muster.
I will admit that whenever his final popped into my head, I felt a shiver of nervous excitement. My son's match clashed with Arsenal's trip to the Bernabéu but I had already made peace with the fact that nothing would interrupt my trip to Carshalton Athletic FC, the venue for the big match, not even if Liverpool, the team I support, had been in action.
The weird part was that having been to almost every match he played before turning 18, I had no idea what I would witness. Would he be more cultured, faster, slower, more combative, less argumentative? And critically, would I be relaxed?
Conor was spotted by Chelsea's academy scouts aged six on the same day and at the same tournament they picked up on Reece James. This allowed me a peek into what life was like for kids who attend Premier League club academies and it was clear from the first outing to Cobham that it was not going to work out.
The competitive edge among parents of boys as young as six would have been laughable if it did not affect their offspring. One dad kept on whining that his son was not being allowed to shine because another boy did not pass to him often enough. Perhaps I might have once or twice in my life thought the same but to say it out loud and with such a loud sense of entitlement was pretty ghastly.
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER BRADLEY ORMESHER
There was a hunger among the parents that was scary. They saw a route to fame, wealth, adulation, vicarious success, and failed to see how the process was designed to exploit their fervour. I have had a few chats with Nigel James, a football coach and father of Reece, over the intervening years about poor parenting and have even introduced him to one father who could see how his son's talent was threatening to consume his life.
Nigel soon explained how to encourage without piling on pressure. One important if obvious message is to not spend the car ride home from a match pointing out all the things the child could have done better. Oh, and do not stand, fixated, during training. It's good for your child to see you sipping a coffee, sitting down, reading and only occasionally looking up.
Driving your children to an academy after school is draining. They eat their meals on the move, complete their homework when they should be chilling out and once a month or so, depending on the club, find out if they are being culled.
We soon stopped but had the local, well-run club to cater for all our footballing needs. As a family we all chipped in, coaching, refereeing and organising. The carrot of a contract at a Premier League club was not necessary to take the game seriously. We were in a happy football maelstrom, which involved trying to watch or coach Conor's team while doing the same for his elder brother, Sam, who played for the same club.
Naturally, I thought I was the perfect mother, but the fact I allowed the behaviour of other parents to rile me meant I was far from ideal. One dad even took a tape measure to away games to make sure the pitch was not too small and not too big — although what he thought anyone was going to do to correct any anomalies an hour before kick-off remained a mystery. And I accept that I had this awful tendency to view matches through the prism of my children rather than how the team performed overall, which meant they could win 4-0 but if one of my sons had not scored or assisted it was ever so slightly unsatisfactory.
And then, aged ten, Conor ruptured his ACL falling off a climbing frame. There followed months of misdiagnosis and, eventually, a meeting with a nervous doctor who blurted out in front of him that Conor would not be able to play football for the next six years or so as any operation would have to wait until his growth had slowed.
We had made football the centre of the family universe so, naturally, he was bewildered. I was livid and crashed my way through the medical world until finding an amazing surgeon who had operated on several Premier League players and was prepared to undertake an experimental operation on a child. There were no relevant statistics to tell me if we should do this, so I asked: 'What would you do if this was your child?' and he said he would operate.
Conor, left, faced years out of the game were it not for experimental ACL surgery
LUCY YOUNG FOR THE TIMES
When Conor was back fit and able to compete again, it was nerve-racking. Would the ligament stay strong? It did. We travelled to watch him compete in an overseas tournament, he won a trophy with his school and then it was time to stop gawping, stop yelling from the touchline. Until this cup final, on an April evening where he seemed to have his own fan club and wouldn't have needed his family there at all.
I wanted him to play well, of course, but I enjoyed his team's solitary and rather lovely goal, scored by — as described in the programme — the 'classy operator' Ben Smith, as much as if Conor had scored it. It felt like I had grown up as much as he had. Or had I?
'You were a bit obsessed with his socks, Mum,' Sam said. 'Going on about how when you washed them, they didn't shrink.'