Football is back – and all the sweeter if you give something else a go

I have an audiobook habit. Not in the sense that I listen to lots of audiobooks. No, I listen to exactly seven audiobooks.

Very occasionally if I’ve had too much of a session in that world, I branch out into a well-known murder mystery series, but whatever happens I always come back to the originals.

I’ll chip in at the beginning or end of a book and then skip the bits that don’t fit (the Cho Chang kissing scene for instance – it makes me cringe). I’ll very rarely go through the whole series from start to finish but pick bits that sort of suit what’s happening in my day.

This is a relatively common phenomenon, it turns out. Maybe you have your own version. What movies and TV series do you watch over and over? Do you even notice yourself choosing them again?

Music’s another obvious area where we stick with the familiar. I read this week that musicologists estimate in every hour of music-listening in an average person’s lifetime live 54 minutes of songs we’ve already heard.

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Which brings me to the Premier League. It’s back! On Monday I was treated to another Tottenham performance so full of promise that then directly channelled last season so exactly it was like we hadn’t been away.

And in the aftermath, I couldn’t help thinking of all of the moments of elation that the summer Olympics had brought.

Clearly football can’t do what the Olympics does. The whole elation of the Games is possible because it is a rare point in time. Because the athletes in Paris weren’t jaded by all this interest and because they are peaking once in a four-year cycle for one or two precious moments.

This is unsustainable in the week-in-week-out setting of England’s top flight and in the world of football in general, where the question seems not to be how can we make these games more special, but rather how can we cram more of these semi-irrelevant games into the year, with little or no deference to the people playing them.

But, like with my Potter habit, I find that when I do branch out from a near-daily football diet, I even appreciate the football more.

If you’re any other sport, the short period after the Games is unparalleled for enthusiasm and publicity. There are middle-distance runners on Good Morning Britain and Keely Hodgkinson is slated for every ad.

But if you’re at work trying to spread your non-football sport more widely, does this bump of recognisability have a long-term effect? There are two areas each sport has to consider – viewers and participants.

And while it’s not clear that watching breeds participating, a sport like cycling has shown the 
more you can get people to empathise with the alien challenges involved in a Tour de France Femmes, the more people make an awed commitment to tune in and watch it.

Road cycling or mountain biking are relatively easy ones to try – rent a bike and take it out on a weekend before saving up your pocket money for rollers or a Pinarello X9 SRAM Red AXS.

And the coverage is so good and exhaustive on (forgive me) Eurosport that you can soon develop a viewing routine nearly as punishing as your football one.

There will be a climbing wall near you if you live in a city. There is a bunch of fencing beginners’ classes in Brixton for £6.50 a go if you take a friend.

If you read last time, you’ll know kayak cross has become something of an obsession for me and I hear Olympians are out trying that at Lee Valley even as I write. You don’t need a medal to go too.

But it does feel hard to change that routine, doesn’t it? Like you’ll be laughed at or exposed as a bandwagon-jumping fraud and you won’t know where to find the toilets.

Unfortunately, researchers have discovered it takes 66 days rather than just 21 to form a habit, so you may need to go back a few times. But the first time is always the hardest. And when you back on the sofa with Liverpool, you’ll find you enjoy it even more.

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