Little Love Replicating Machines
My son's first love affair, with a local seventeen year-old-boy
Over the last few months, my son has fallen truly, madly, and deeply, head‑over‑heels in love.
The object of his affection? A seventeen‑year‑old boy who goes to a local school. His name? Lamine Yamal: arguably the most exciting footballer in the world today, and odds‑on favourite to win the 2025 Ballon d'Or, which will crown him this season’s best player.
My son’s school is less than a thirty-minute walk from Camp Nou, where Yamal plays week in, week out for his club FC Barcelona. BARÇA is all we now talk about—from when the sun comes up until my son goes down. The next morning, it’s BARÇA again. Is his shirt clean, and can he wear it to school today? (“Yes, and yes.”) Do I want to look through his Panini football album with him? (“Not this morning, but you can show me after school.”) Do I want to see his shiny VAMOS card with Yamal, Raphinha and Pedri together? (“Sure, why not, but can you eat your breakfast first?”) Do I know that his friend Marc has a SUPER CRACK Lamine Yamal card that says BALLON D’OR on it? (For the fifth time this week: yes, I remember.)
Last Sunday, I met up with some local papis for a Dadurday here. We brought our kids to a new park that seems to be a soft-play facsimile of Apple’s ring-shaped headquarters in Cupertino. Afterwards, a buddy and I took our two sons to a local bar to watch FC Barcelona play. Most games here in Spain kick off at 9 pm—an obscene time even for adults—which means stadiums filled with sleepy kids, and most starting well after my son has gone to bed. But this was a rare Sunday afternoon kick-off, so we were in luck. Spain has a wonderful culture of peñas: small social clubs that come together over a shared passion. This might be the organising committee for one of the many local fiestas that animate towns and city neighbourhoods. Or it could be around a football team: depending on their popularity, a club may have hundreds of peñas spread across the world. Barcelona has more than seventy inside the city limits, and more than 1,250 worldwide.
Each peña in the city has a corresponding bar, and we have two within a five-minute walk of the house. We arrived at the one ten minutes before kick-off, surprised to find it almost empty. Result. But on closer inspection, every seat and table had a name written on it. Xavi. Carles. Jordi. But no room at the inn for us. We tried another. This one, not so quiet—the kids were wondering what the noise was as we walked up the street, before realising it was the cacophony of singing fans. We slipped in just as the players were taking to the pitch, every seat in the bar filled, the atmosphere electric. FC Barcelona, thanks to my son’s new love Yamal, could all but clinch La Liga with a win here. The only issue? This was El Clásico, the biggest game in football, against their arch‑rivals: the galáctico‑rich powerhouse Real Madrid.
This is a football rivalry unlike many others. These teams detest each other. Like Rangers and Celtic in Glasgow, the war on the pitch is a proxy battle for the one between the people; here, it’s the perceived overreach of Madrid versus the fierce independence of Catalonia. This pot boils over on the regular. One example, amongst many: in the year 2000, Luis Figo finished five glorious years with the club before shocking everyone and defecting to their inland enemies. When he returned to Camp Nou on 2002, the chorus of boos in the stadium were deafening. As he walked onto the pitch, a flash of pink hurtled through the air and landed next to his feet. Looking down, Figo saw the bloodied severed head of a pig staring up at him through the grass. Think about this, for a minute—this couldn’t have been a solo project, to bring a dead pig’s head into a football stadium and launch it from the terraces—there had to be a host of people who knew about it, saw it, nodded, and probably screamed “¡VENGA!”
Sunday’s game kicked off, and the crowd roared Barça forward, inside the stadium and our bar alike. Every tackle came in surround sound, the screams of “¡FALTA!” mingling with enough colourful palabrotas that kept my son looking at me with his eyebrows raised (“Did you hear what he said?”). Madrid took an early lead, before scoring again, and my son looked on concerned. I gave him my best Disney face: “Don’t worry—the good guys always win.” And then, according to plan, Barcelona turned it on, and turned them over, winning 4-3 in a game where four goals were disallowed. It was an all-time great Clásico, completing a clean sweep of all four this season—the first time either club has managed a perfect record against the other.
One day, your child will inevitably ask: “Where do babies come from?”
Depending on the age of inquiry—and ask they will, nothing is more certain, and it’ll almost always be at the worst moment possible, like when you’re trying to cross four lanes of traffic after merging on just before your exit—you’ll either answer with an anatomically correct explanation or, if they’re younger, some form of “Well, when a mummy really loves a daddy …”
Children, at their most reductive, are manifestations and representations of our love in the physical world. They are the joining of two people—regularly in love, but not always—into one. They are creations of love, and require love to sustain them, especially in those early days, weeks, months and years. But they do not just take love: they are generous givers. They replicate the love they’re shown and reflect it back tenfold. And it’s not just your love for them—it’s your love for anything. A love of music. A love of movies. A love of the great outdoors. A love—one that may have lain dormant for many years—in football.
The most glorious day in the history of my club came in the city I now call home, in the stadium next to my son’s school. On May 26th, 1999, my beloved Manchester United faced Bayern Munich in the final of the European Champions League. After going down 1-0 to a free-kick after six minutes, United struggled to gain a foothold. Bayern hit the post (twice), United’s keeper Peter Schmeichel was everywhere, and it looked like it was all over—until the first minute of added time, when Teddy Sheringham poked in Ryan Giggs’ scuffed shot. Two minutes later, Ole Gunnar Solskjær flicked Sheringham’s header high into the net, sealing a 2–1 win, the trophy, and the historic Treble—three major titles in a single season, something no English team had achieved before.
That game was refereed by Pierluigi Collina, a man voted the world’s best referee for five years in a row, who called it “the most memorable night of his career” and later recalled the deafening noise of the United fans as if “there was a roaring lion” at the end of the game. We felt that roar a thousand miles away, back in Manchester. My dad and I had been going to Old Trafford over the last few years—as soon as he’d started making enough money at work to cover the essentials, he’d shelled out on a pair of season tickets for the two of us. We watched United knock out some of Europe’s best teams on the way to the final that year. Although we couldn’t take the trip to Barcelona to watch the game, I joined some of his friends and brought one of my own to watch it in a local pub. Was I too young to be there? Absolutely. Did the manager, a fellow United fan, turn a blind eye? Of course he did. Did we have a few sneaky beers before getting wildly drunk on the champagne my dad ordered after the second goal went in? You bet you ass we did.
Our children offer countless opportunities to share our love with them in whatever form it takes. They can be an excuse to pick up a hobby you always wanted to try, as I did with my daughter when we learned how to play the piano together. It’s a folly to attempt to live our unfulfilled dreams through them, having seen the results of that in family and friends; but we can share our passions with these little versions of ourselves, and, if magic happens and it clicks, see that love reflected back, just as their faces mirror our love for them. I’m more excited about football today than I have been in a decade, simply because of how much my son adores it. And this love spreads: it has not just brought me closer to the game I once loved, but has offered me a chance to view my own history differently, and see the good times spent with my own dad, reflected from a perspective that could only come into focus decades later.
3 things to read this week
“When You Walk Through a Storm” by Alisson Becker in The Players' Tribune. Continuing the football theme. It pains me to do it, but I’ll grit my teeth and type through this. This is the part where I have to note how important it is for more men in public to do the bold work of being vulnerable and opening up. Even if he is the goalkeeper for Liverpool FC. Genuinely lovely memories of Becker’s father, how he supported him throughout his life, and helped him become the father he is today. This came from one Dadscord dad who said, “I didn’t have ‘crying in a bathroom stall at work’ on my bingo card today, but here we are.“
“I Learned to Listen From My Dad” by Jill Mapes in Hearing Things. A beatiful reflection from a daughter on the love her father had for music, and memories of seeing him “lying on the carpeted floor of a living room, legs up on the couch, listening to music on headphones in the dark for an hour, multiple times a week […] his private listening sessions about processing his feelings. Sometimes, I would spot the faint glimmer of a tear rolling down his cheek and into the yellow foam of his vintage headphones.” Gorgeous stuff. (Thanks,
.)“The Anatomy Of A Marriage” by Annie Macmanus in Changes. Capping off “love week” is this short one from DJ and writer Annie Mac, reflections on love, marriage, and raising children with her husband and fellow DJ Toddla T: “As long as we can be two wholly realised people in this relationship, then that marriage spreading out before us is genuinely exciting to me.”
☑️ Book Manuscript: Sent
Big news this week—in this house, for sure—as the manuscript for the book is now with my publisher. This doesn’t mean the book is done—simply that it’s not my problem for the next two months as my editor and agent read it and share their feedback. The sense of relief is palpable, and my fear of “Am I going to be able to write this?” has now been replaced with the dread of “Is my editor going to think it’s terrible?” Writing—an emotional rollercoaster!
The New Fatherhood: Why Everything They Told You Was Wrong, and How Embracing Fatherhood Will Transform Your Life is tentatively scheduled for release on May 26th, 2025. I’ll talk much more about it over the next twelve months, don’t worry.
Getting this checked off the to-do list will free me up for more TNF stuff, and other fun projects, too. So expect to see more happening in our Dadurdays communities—free to join, now with 550+ dads in 34 cities—as well as regular online Dad’s Circles for paid subscribers, starting next month. We’ll be roping in the experts to help run these, enrolling Pasco and the Men’s Circle crew. (Check out this excellent article in The Guardian to read more about their great work.)
Will be sharing details in the Dadscord on this one, but if you’re interested in dipping your toe into this often tough but always rewarding work with a group of like-minded dads, this is as good a place to start as anywhere.
Good Dadvice
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Congrats on getting that manuscript over the line, Kevin!
Cheers to this one; very well done!