Anyone who knows me well knows I grew up in a house full of football-mad men, two brothers and a dad who played it, watched it, collected the sticker books, and talked about nothing else. I can still hear the sing-song cadence of the classified results being read out on the telly on a Saturday evening, it was the comforting soundtrack of my entire childhood. I joke that I moved 3,000 miles partly to escape the sport. So this summer has been a challenge, and this week even more so, because I’ve somehow ended up writing a story about football anyway. Through the lens of the Royals, admittedly, but still. Turns out the future king is trying to dodge the sport as much as me this summer!

Football, or soccer as the Americans insist on calling it, is England’s game. It’s the national pastime, and every British household has been glued to the team’s run through this year’s World Cup after two decades of nearly-but-not-quite. There was the World Cup semi-final loss to Croatia in 2018, the Euro final defeat on penalties to Italy in 2021, a World Cup quarter-final exit to France in 2022, then another Euro final lost to Spain in 2024. Four near-misses in six years is enough to wear down even the most patient fanbase, so this time round has carried a different feeling entirely, a sense that this squad, and this manager, might actually be the ones to end it.