2010 A squad to be proud of

Matthew Huish
May 7, 2010

As adolescent boys, my brothers and I collected football sticker albums. We would buy packets of stickers, most of them being a portrait of a football player in their kit at their ground, and there would also be team portraits and club badges on metallic, reflective backgrounds. We would also buy an album, a magazine with lots of information but also many gaps, into which we would stick the appropriate aforementioned sticker. Each team would have several pages dedicated to statistics about their club history and their current squad. We would study the information ravenously, memorizing key dates and facts. Our mother wished we would devote as much effort to our school work as we did to football.

For us, constructing the album was a total investment of sincere devotion: We took great care to insert the stickers within the correct boundaries and sought to collect all the stickers for the album. Often we'd acquire stickers we didn't need because we already had them -- "doubles", we'd call them -- and in the school playground we'd find people who desired our doubles and swap them for stickers we needed. Rare stickers sometimes took on greater value, demanding a greater number of stickers in return for the single rarity. Nevertheless, each sticker represented someone hallowed, the privileged few who represented a Premier League club and played in the greatest stadia in the country.

Once completed, the sticker album took on sanctified status.

When I look at the people in our faith community, a similar feeling emerges. Each person in our community has their past records, with their own victories and challenges. We've had good seasons, we've had bad seasons. Some of us took a lengthy absence due to injury, some of us retired from playing to focus on managing. Maybe we transfer where we play, but in the end we're all playing the same game, for the love of the game. Each person, regardless of their position, squad number or club, becomes a living saint, privileged to be playing in the greatest season of the greatest competition of history. I want to collect everyone, so the sticker album of humanity can be complete. I don't want a single face to be missing from the album, otherwise it will forever be incomplete.

I look forward to when my son is old enough to begin collecting football stickers…