by Rishika Rastogi
I should say upfront that I didn’t really like football. Not in a principled way; I just never watched it. Watching football always looked like a lot of grown men being very sad about a ball. So the fact that I spent most of June this year awake at crazy o’clock in the ISH common room, gripping a cushion and shouting at a slightly buffering stream, is genuinely one of the more surprising things that has happened to me since I moved here in August 2025 from India.
A country that doesn’t do half-measures in football
What I hadn’t considered was the nation I’d relocated to. I don’t believe I realised until this summer that England doesn’t take half-measures in football. Flags were flown from automobiles and windows. Every tavern added a whiteboard promising to show every World Cup game. Strangers on the bus suddenly wanted to chat to you about formations. There was a low national hum throughout the month, a communal holding of breath, and even someone like me, who couldn’t identify a single player in May, got caught up in it. You can’t live in the thick of it and only visit as a tourist. You must pick a team to support or hate throughout.
Two friends, one group
Here’s how it started for us, though. My friend from Japan, who lives two doors down, mentioned over instant noodles one evening that Japan and the Netherlands had ended up in the same group. She said it the way you’d mention that two friends had accidentally booked the same holiday. And my Dutch roommate, who I have never once seen without an opinion, heard this from across the kitchen and said very calmly, “We will beat you.” The Japanese resident just smiled. That smile did a lot of work.
On the night of the game, half the building descended to The Thirsty Scholar, the in-house bar at ISH. With a big television screen in the building, The Thirsty Scholar became the unofficial stadium. The Dutch resident arrived dressed entirely in orange. The Japanese resident brought food that she refused to share with anyone who supported the Netherlands, which made up the majority of the room. And my Nepalese friend, another ISH Resident, who had proclaimed himself an impartial commentator due to the absence of a national team in the competition, cheered both sides.
Ninety minutes of football, one sofa, and a whole country holding its breath
The match ended 2-2. I’ve subsequently discovered that this is what people refer to as “a good game,” and I could tell since I didn’t glance at my phone for 90 minutes. The Dutch resident spent the final 10 minutes standing up, while the Japanese resident did not move at all, which I now understand is its own type of intensity. When the whistle blew, there was a bizarre, euphoric standstill. Nobody had lost.
When that standstill was broken, everyone had something to say into the late-night hours.
Football unites more than it divides
That was something I had not expected. I assumed that watching football with people from all around the world meant that everyone would be nicely applauding for their own flag. It’s considerably messier than that. The Nepalese resident is an excellent example. With no team of his own in the tournament, he supported a new one every three days, usually on the flimsiest of grounds. For example, he supported Morocco because a Moroccan person on his course was friendly to him. He cheered for Spain because he loved their jerseys. And, like the rest of us, he embraced England because it turns out that when you live somewhere, and everyone else is dreaming the same dream, you start dreaming it as well.
We watched an England game in a pub off the high street, because you cannot watch England in your common room. An England match feels like it belongs to the whole city at once, and we wanted to be in the middle of it. It was crammed, and loud, and someone spilled a full pint down my back during a corner, yet I have honestly never felt more included in anything. Nobody there cared that we were international students far from home. For ninety minutes we were just part of the same enormous, anxious, hopeful crowd, singing songs I didn’t know the words to and learning them fast.
Heartbreak, in three languages
Both Japan and the Netherlands made it out of the group, which meant for one glorious week my two ISH-mates were no longer rivals but allies. Both, still alive. All of us stayed up for games that kicked off long after the kitchen had gone quiet. And then the tournament did what the tournament does, which is break your heart on a school night.
The Netherlands went out to Morocco in a game that went right to the wire, and my roommate, who had been so orange and so loud all month, went completely silent. I have never seen her quiet before. Somebody made her tea. Nobody said “it’s just a game,” because in that room it very clearly wasn’t. Japan went out the very next day, and lost to Brazil. The Japanese resident didn’t cry in front of everyone, but I’m fairly sure she cried later, and the Dutch resident who’d been her enemy three weeks earlier sat with her the whole game and walked her back upstairs afterwards.
And then England went too, knocked out by Argentina after a game that had the whole city daring to hope. You could feel the disappointment settle over everything at once, like a street that had been ready to party and then didn’t. By that point we’d had our hearts broken in three languages, plus a fourth we’d borrowed.
A football final none of us should have cared about
The final was Spain and Argentina, and none of us had any real reason to care except that Argentina were the ones who’d knocked England out, so the entire building, and I suspect the entire country, was quietly desperate for them to lose. Every single one of us watched, packed into that common room like it was the most important night of the year. When Spain scored deep into extra time, the loudest person was my friend from Nepal, in a Spain shirt he’d bought that afternoon.
What we were actually doing
I don’t fully know how to explain what those weeks were, except that I arrived in this city not knowing a single person. Now, I know how my roommate takes her tea. I know the face my friend makes when her team concedes. Football was mostly an excuse. What we were actually doing, at 2am, in a room that smelled of instant noodles, in a country that had lost its mind over a game, was becoming the kind of people who wait up for each other.
I still don’t really like football. But I’ll be there for the next one. Front row. Cushion ready.
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