I’ve been searching, as I think we all are, in this ever-darkening world of ours, for truth. For something to hang on to, something authentic, something that captures the ebbs and flows of life with beauty and grace.
And, strangely, I think I might have found it in an unlikely place: the scrappy, rain-soaked, underfunded world of lower-league football.
It sounds odd, I know. But give me a minute to explain. Lower-tier football is existential. It is agony and ecstasy. It is fun, random, of and for the people. It is walking down to the stadium on a wet Wednesday night and standing shoulder to shoulder with fellow punters, eating a soggy pie, drinking a luke-cold beer, and watching a dire 0-0 draw as the rain pelts through your clothes and slides off your nose. All those things, the beer, the pie, the score, they all remind you of better pies, better beers, better games, and you are reminded of what it is to be human and how lucky we all are to live this human existence. As Camus said, apparently, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
A young Camus, preparing to take the pitch, no doubt thinking about the significance of the moment.
And so, I’m throwing myself into the world of lower-tier, underdog football, in a search for meaning, truth and maybe even happiness (and by football I mean soccer, for Americans, Australians, and any non-Europeans who may be reading or listening). Over the next year, I’ll be watching, listening, talking, blogging, vlogging, podding and slogging through the lower leagues.
It’s not totally new for me. I was obsessed with English football as a pre-teen, growing up in Brisbane in the mid-90s. My dad’s mate, Chris Eden, was a draftsman, an amateur photographer, and, crucially, a Yorkshireman. It was peak Beckham era. I was just starting to fall for the Red Devils: Posh and Becks, Paul Scholes, Roy Keane. But then Chris took a trip home to Leeds and returned with a classic Leeds home shirt.
At the time, Leeds had just lived a whole decade’s worth of drama in a few short seasons: promotion from the second division in 1990, league champions in ‘92, then a nosedive to 17th the very next year. It was wild, up and down, all the things. And it began a love affair for me, not just with Leeds, but with the lesser team.
By the time I got to university, I’d moved on—sports-wise, at least. I still kept one eye on European football, but I threw myself into other obsessions: cricket, rugby league, Aussie rules, tennis. Then, after moving to America in my mid-20s, American football and basketball. (I’m yet to develop any affection for baseball, but maybe that’s next.)
But in my late 30s, I got pulled back in. It started with the odd QPR match on ESPN+, my dad’s team, from his time living in Shepherd’s Bush in the ‘70s, along with every other Aussie expat. Like every other man nearing (hitting?) middle age, I watched the Wrexham and Sunderland documentaries. And suddenly I was hooked, on drama, on narrative tension, on the chaos playing out every week in these leagues. Clubs on the brink of collapse. Clubs brushing up against glory. The cyclical nature of success and failure, and the decisions that get us there.
A typical Australian in Shepherd’s Bush in the 1970s.
And I thought, there’s something here. Something real. Something I want to understand. Because football—especially at the top—has become so fucking mental. FIFA corruption. Billionaire owners. Absurd transfer fees. Global trending machines swallowing local identity. The globalization of sport is giving and taking like never before, and these little clubs are caught in the current.
So is there still some simple, indescribable, earnest, wholesome joy to be found in football? And what might it tell me about the world we’re living in, the world we used to live in, and maybe even about myself?
It was Camus (and I swear, I’m not a big Camus guy, despite the fact that I’ve now quoted him twice) who said, “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I learnt from football.” And that’s kind of what this whole thing is about.
So, if you’re anything like me, and you like underdog stories, watching football, talking about pseudo-philosophical nonsense and following threads of chaos toward something that feels like truth, then I hope you’ll come along for this journey, too.
About me
Sam Martin is the founder of Minnows Football. A bit about Sam:
- Reformed tech executive (experienced ego death sometime between 2022 and 2025)
- Stay at home dad (previously not great at it, now not bad)
- Old school sports nut (ie. Still read words on a page about sports, sometimes even in print)
- Discovering the meaning of life through second tier football
Minnows Football 