How do men really bond? For me, it’s been 25 years of kicking a ball – then sharing the stuff of life | Graham Snowdon

Every week, we play football for an hour and then retire to the pub to talk tactics, kids, marriage and work. It's so much more than sport

It's the middle of summer, which means a new football season. The glory game hardly sleeps these days: we're in the midst of the Women's World Cup and there is the constant spectre of the Saudi power grab on men's elite football. As a fan, I'll still embrace this hypothetical moment of renewal. But the big kick-off for me will come in early September with the return of the Thursday night football game that, for the last 25 years, I've played in almost every week.

I first got involved with it in 1998, when I was invited along by friends in the time-honoured way. Most of my Thursday evenings since then, amid changes of jobs and circumstance, have been defined by a routine of ferreting around the house for contact lenses, grabbing whatever bits of kit I can find and shoving a towel into a tatty old orange bag. At about 8.20pm, summoned by the beep of a horn outside the house, I'll squeeze into the back of a car that was patently not designed for four portly middle-aged men.

Graham Snowdon is the acting editor of Guardian Weekly