Novelist Rebecca Watson: ‘I can leave a show or book unmoved, but with football I always feel’

W hen I was six, my family’s tin of felt tips began to deplete. I don’t know whether anyone noticed, or how many disappeared. Memory is fickle like that: it doesn’t care for the whole story. What I do remember is that, nights in a row, I would carefully select my least favourite colour before sequestering the pen in my school bag like a top-secret agent. The pens were for a boy in my class who had set me an entry fee. If I wanted to play football at break, then there was a cost. I knew it was because I was a girl, and that it was unfair, but still I handed over my felt tips. The only thing that really mattered was the football.

I never expected that my love of football and my life as a writer would have much overlap, but they do. The space for imagination – for what your mind can build – is vast in football. The experience of being a football supporter is complicated and dramatic, and that’s what I love about it. I love the emotions, the bias, the narrative built into watching a game.

“I frequently walk out of the theatre early without fear of missing anything. But however bad I’ve felt, I’ve never left a football match early,” the late playwright Sarah Kane wrote in 1998, in a prelude to a review of the Edinburgh fringe. Kane was a Manchester United fan, and she describes how the performance of football – how it “puts you in direct physical contact with thought and feeling” – occurs in the best of theatre. I don’t know whether she was the first playwright to explore the overlap between the two, but she definitely wasn’t the last. James Graham’s new play, Dear England,will bring football to the National Theatre this summer. Artistic director Rufus Norris describes the play, which centres on England manager Gareth