How To Watch The World Cup When The Nation You Live In Hasn't Qualified Episode One: Make a bootleg tee

"He’s coming home, bro", a young Mexican man with a flag around his neck says to me whilst pointing at my t-shirt. It’s true, Raúl Jiménez is coming back to his, and my, spiritual home of Wolverhampton. It’s true, I have made a silly bootleg t-shirt with three versions of Raul celebrating goals, an illustration of the Mexico 1986 World Cup mascot Pique (a sombrero-wearing anthropomorphic jalapeno pepper) on the crest, and then the words Si Señor (from the song that Wolves fans sing about Raul) alongside it. It’s true, I may have gone a little bit mad.

This is what the World Cup is for. This is what it does. Every four years, the Gods of football let their very own Garden of Eden down from the heavens, stick two goalposts and a ball in it, and the rusty hands on our clocks turn back. Grown men and women revert back into kids. Kids that want to collect stickers to put in sticker books. Kids that want to buy wall charts to write the scores in every day. Kids that, yes, want to make a t-shirt with their favourite player on it. The snakes and apple trees of capitalist brutality are still circling, sure, but when you get to watch Uzbekistan v Colombia or Haiti v Scotland or Iraq v Norway, you can briefly forget that people like Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump exist.

The problem is that Italy messed up. They messed it up for me. Having moved here two years ago, I was looking forward to watching the national team at a World Cup. Taking in 3am kick-offs stood outside with the temperature still at 25C whilst sinking four euro beers seemed very appealing to someone who will quite literally watch any match, at any time, anywhere.

But the best part of a World Cup is that you can choose your own adventure within it. Football fans can trace their lives by World Cups. We remember what job we had or who we were dating or what we were wearing or where we were living. World Cups provide chapters to our lives, allowing us to look back at who we were and what we have become. And how you consume it defines that. You can save up all your money for a decade, book flights to the host nation, and have the most spectacular month of your life. You can sit in your room for a whole month and watch every single game, adjusting your own bodyclock to a timezone on another continent whilst falling deeply in love with players you’d never heard of before.

Or, you can join the crowd where you live. Find the communities of countries that are involved, find out where they’re going, and join in. Last night at Bar Sport in Via Antonio Stoppani, I did just that.

First up: the T-Shirt. Raúl Jiménez is a hero at my hometown club Wolverhampton Wanderers. The most technically gifted footballer I have ever seen at my club, I saw Raul do things with a football that made grown adults shake their heads, look up at the sky, burst into tears. He scored important goals, loved the city, and my city loved him back. The noise of 30,000 people from Wolverhampton singing There’s something that the Wolves want you to know / He’s the best in the world and he comes from Mexico / He’s our number nine / Give the ball to Raul / And he will score / Si, señor / Give the ball to Raul and he will score could well be the noise that I hear on my deathbed. It’s the song I hum when washing up. The song I sing to my children when they won’t go to sleep. The song I sang loudest when he was there.

So, I opened InDesign, stole some photos off the internet, put them loosely on a T-Shirt and asked some friends if they thought it was any good. They did not. But that’s ok. This is a Bootleg T-Shirt. They are not supposed to be good. I jumped on my bike, cycled down Viale Monza, and got the very nice people at Fatto Do Ya! to print it off.

Next, I cycled to La Patrona, a Mexican cafe near Via Padova that serves the best tacos, fried fish, and hibiscus punch I’ve ever eaten. I’d hoped they’d be showing the game on the telly, but they don’t actually have a telly. I told them good luck tonight and got back on my bike.

Instead, I headed to Bar Sport. Bar Sport ticks all the boxes for a place to watch football. There are retro shirts and scarves hanging on the walls. Classic archive photos of Ronaldo Nazario in Moscow, Diego Maradona wearing his No Drugs shirt scattered around. an two massive televisions in the window with loads of shiny, happy-faced Mexicans spilling out onto the pavement and road. Facepaint. 90s Jorge Campos goalkeeper jerseys. adidas jackets you wish you owned, face paint. A tapestry of green, white, and red. With Santo Tacos cooking up a treat in the kitchen, this was perfect.

With Mexico one-nil up at half time, the atmosphere was rippling, and then they turned up. From nowhere. A complete surprise. Walking down the pavement. Straight into the middle of the crowd. Four of them. All black suits with white buttons.. Black sombreros. Instruments in hand.

Like a mirage, the mariachi band played. Trumpet, guitar, singer. And played. And played. The crowd went wild. And then. Like they’d never been there. The mariachi band carried on down the road. Disappeared. Dissolved into the night.

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When you choose your own adventures, when you decide to do the thing you weren’t sure you were gonna do, good things happen. When you get the train on your own to the place you want to visit. When you go for the lunch on your own. When you send the email that you thought would be ignored.

And, as Raúl Jiménez scored in the second half, I felt the arm of a stranger around my shoulder, said Si Señor under my breath, and told myself that sometimes, making a silly bootleg shirt to go watch the World Cup in is alright.