Why I stopped watching highlights

I watched an enormous amount of football this summer, and by the end of it I could not remember most of it. That bothered me more than I expected.

The problem, I think, is that I was not really watching. I was catching up. Three minutes here, a clip there, the goals and the arguments about the goals, all of it arriving pre-selected by someone else's judgment about what mattered. It is an efficient way to know what happened. It is a terrible way to understand anything.

A highlight reel is built from outcomes. It shows you the shot and not the twenty minutes of positioning that made the shot possible, because those twenty minutes are unwatchable out of context and indispensable in it. Strip them out and every goal looks like luck, because in isolation most goals do.

So I went back to full matches. Fewer of them, obviously — there are only so many evenings. The first few were hard work. I had lost the habit of sustained attention, and there is a real and slightly embarrassing withdrawal period where nothing seems to be happening and your hand keeps reaching for your phone.

Then it came back. The slow accumulation, the sense of a match having a shape and a direction, the ability to see a substitution coming before it arrives. None of that survives compression. You either sit through the boring parts or you do not get it, and the boring parts turn out not to be boring once you have given them enough time to become legible.

I watch perhaps a third as much football as I did in June. I remember nearly all of it.