Seventeen

Joel Beighton on the age when football means the world.

Words: Joel Beighton

Football doesn’t hit me like it used to.

The sheer excitement, bordering on fear before big games. Night matches with real edge. Games where there was a genuine sense of jeopardy, and packed away ends that somehow felt fuller than was humanly possible.

Part of it is age, part of it is the direction football has taken. But when I look back on my time as a Blade, one thread stands out more than the rest. My own growth from child to adult has mirrored what I’ve experienced following Sheffield United.

I started going to games in 1997, aged seven. My first was a 0–0 draw against Birmingham City. I remember being wide-eyed, slightly confused by the constant noise around me, shouting and singing from all directions. I don’t remember the game itself, which probably isn’t surprising given the result. In some ways it was fitting. It set the tone for what the next thirty years would hold.

Those early years came at a time when Bramall Lane was quieter than it is now. Around 16,000 most weeks. Bigger games might push into the mid-twenties, but those were real occasions. My dad and I sat on John Street, with a perfect view of the away end, watching opposition fans spill in and take over that part of the ground. It doesn’t feel the same now, even with more people in attendance. Maybe it’s familiarity. Maybe it’s something else.

Not long after I started going, the first real crack appeared. The FA Cup semi-final against Newcastle United, at Old Trafford. My first game away from Bramall Lane. Coaches leaving from Rotherham town centre, packed with Blades. The Trafford Centre looming in the distance, someone joking that we may as well be back at Meadowhall. A pub beforehand, rammed beyond capacity, the sound of “We are Bladesmen…” ringing out on repeat.

I persuaded my dad to buy me one of those cheap flags on a pole on the walk to the ground. I waved it constantly, in time with the almost omnipresent “We are Bladesmen…”. Then Shearer scores and the rest of the game drifts by. No equaliser. Final whistle. I cry. It wasn’t meant to happen like that. It’s the first time I remember football doing that to me.

After that came something different. More than anything else, mediocrity and boredom. The following seasons blur together. Players in and out. Managers in and out, Steve Bruce, Adrian Heath, early Warnock. Nothing quite sticks. The emotional highs and lows are replaced by something flatter. Football becomes something that just happens. A ritual without much reward.

Then, unexpectedly, it all comes back. The West Brom game in 2002. I’m nearly twelve. Chaos, controversy, something I won’t try to retell because anyone reading this already knows what happened. But it gave me my first proper taste of drama, albeit in bizarre circumstances, of football as something unpredictable and all-consuming again. It reignited something that had gone quiet.

What followed was everything you could want as a fan. Late wins against Leeds and Forest. Liverpool at home. A derby under the lights, Michael Brown’s goal, the noise almost overwhelming. The FA Cup run, the semi-final, David Seaman somehow keeping Peschisolido’s effort out. And then the play-off final against Wolves. The inevitable twist. The lesson that being a Blade always comes with a price tag of something going wrong.

And then, finally, the release. Promotion to the Premier League. I’m sixteen. A group of mates all going together, home and away. The buzz of trying to get served for a pint and sometimes succeeding. Football becomes the centre of everything. The only thing that really matters.

It feels like the start of something. It isn’t.

At Wigan, just before Christmas, it all shifts. We’re in the away end after a Rob Hulse winner, confident and singing tongue-in-cheek songs about going on a European tour. Before we know it, it is Wigan again at Bramall Lane, the last game of the season. Nobody can really see a way we go down from here. Too much would have to go wrong. And then it does. West Ham win at Old Trafford. We lose. Relegation.

I’d just turned seventeen. I think that was the last time I felt anything like pure, childlike excitement and naivety watching United. Not just because we went down, but because something else went with it. The sense that things would work out, or at least that they might.

After that, it’s different. Cynicism creeps in. It becomes easier to expect the worst than hope for the best. More play-off defeats. A drop to League One. Things I never really thought I’d see. You adjust. You carry on. But something has changed.

There have been very good times since. Chris Wilder. Paul Heckingbottom. Moments where it feels like it’s back, where everything aligns again.

But it’s never quite the same. It doesn’t carry the same weight it once did. Not like those early nights under the lights, when everything felt bigger than it should have.

I think that’s what’s gone. Not the football itself, but the feeling that it mattered more than anything else in the world.

Football fans are often seen as childish. Maybe that’s part of it. An attempt to keep going back, hoping to feel it like we did at the start.

I sometimes wonder what it feels like being seventeen today. Do the unexpected moments land in the same way, or does a culture where everything is seen and shared so quickly take the edge away? Does football still mean the world?

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