I had been warned about how cold it would get in the Alan Kelly Stand at Preston North End F.C.’s Deepdale ground, and yet that harsh, biting chill still shocked me. I had put on a thermal layer, a jumper, and grabbed an old windbreaker from the hook as I walked out. I had rammed my bare feet into my UGGs, which I am told is the appropriate way to wear them, and hoped this would be enough to keep my toes warm.
It had been a mild day, unlike most November afternoons in Preston, so part of me remained sceptical as my grandfather lectured me on dressing properly.
‘Bring gloves, don’t forget. Do you need a scarf? A hat?’, he asked, holding each item in turn, as if to emphasise the seriousness of the situation.
I accepted the scarf, mostly because it was blue and white. I wanted, at the very least, to look like a fan, rather than someone who did not even fully understand the rules.
When we arrived at Deepdale, the weather was still mild. The crowd moved slowly across the car park, drifting toward food stands, queuing for pies and chips, talking easily. I felt quietly vindicated. Surely this was proof that my grandfather had been exaggerating.
But he was right.
Within an hour, the wind had settled in. It crept through the stands, under the seats, through layers of clothing that had seemed sufficient only moments before. I found myself clutching the still-warm flask of tea I had brought, shifting my feet constantly to keep some feeling in them.
‘It’s bloody cold,’ I muttered, as if that were not already obvious.
My grandfather laughed. He looked at me for a moment, then reached into his pocket, rummaging around before pulling out a pair of thick gloves. He handed them to me without much ceremony.
He had brought them for hand-cycling, he said.
They were far too big, and I could not use my phone while wearing them, but I did not care. My hands were warm, and that was enough.
It feels slightly strange that this is meant to be an essay about football across generations, and yet I have said almost nothing about the match itself. I could not tell you, with any real certainty, who scored, whether there were cards, or even how the game ended. I think it was Blackburn Rovers F.C. we were playing, but even that feels uncertain now.
At the time, it all seemed to matter. Now, what remains is something else entirely. Cold hands. A scarf in club colours. Gloves that were never really mine.
It became clear to me, quite quickly, that the so-called ‘beautiful game’, as Pelé once described it, is about far more than the movement of a ball across a pitch.
It lives in the stands.
It is in the chants that rise and fall, not always in perfect unison, but with enough rhythm to feel collective. It is in the way voices gather strength, how strangers become briefly aligned through repetition and sound:
We’re the one and only North End,
We’re the one and only North End.
The words themselves are simple, but that hardly matters. What matters is the act of saying them together.
These are not things you are taught formally. No one explains when to join in or how loudly to sing. You learn by listening, by watching, by being there. It is something absorbed rather than instructed.
In that sense, football feels less like a sport and more like a form of inheritance.
It is passed down in small, almost imperceptible ways. Through habits, through rituals, through shared routines that do not need to be explained because they have always been there. A grandfather reminding you to bring gloves. A scarf offered without insistence. A seat in the stands that has likely been occupied by the same family, in one form or another, for years.
Clubs like Preston North End F.C. are not simply teams. They are part of a local fabric, woven into the identity of a place. Their histories stretch back into the nineteenth century, rooted in working communities where football was never just entertainment, but something closer to belonging. For my own family, it began with my Great-Grandfather, who decided in 1928 that this was his team, and that was that.
To support a club is, in some ways, to inherit a story.
You might not remember every match, every scoreline, or every player. What stays with you are the patterns. The routines. The people you went with. The feeling of being part of something that existed long before you arrived, and will continue long after.
Watching football with my grandfather has made that particularly clear. I am not just learning the rules of a game. I am learning how to sit in the cold and stay anyway. How to listen for the rhythm of a crowd. How to recognise the small moments that matter more than the final result.
The gloves were a practical gesture, but they were also something else. A quiet act of care, offered without much thought, and accepted without question.
That, more than anything, is what I remember.
And perhaps that is what it means to pass something on.