Two weeks before Euro 2024 began, it came to me like a vision: it was time for a work sweepstake. So I clicked send all and hoped that more than one person would be interested. I needn’t have worried. I’ve never had so many responses to a group email.
The enthusiastic reception means I’ve ended up running two sweepstakes — one with allocated countries and one more complicated: involving goal predictions and a feverishly updated spreadsheet. It has triggered another side in me (did I mention the spreadsheet?) and in my colleagues too. One even brought in a Euro wall chart for the office while another ungenerously hailed me as a ladette, which I hope will be quietly retired as a nickname.
The office this year has been a microcosm of what the Euros initiate. Even my colleagues who don’t like football have been invoking it as bonus snark: Oh, is something happening today?, one intoned on a recent England match day. The tournament encourages a different energy in both its followers and dissenters. The inevitable starting points for conversation — “How are you” or “how was your weekend”: questions doomed for mundane answers or hedged responses — have turned to new and knowing half phrases. “Presumably you saw . . .?” It is not that anybody has changed, but that a dynamic has opened up.