Mum got us a dog in 1998. We called her Fifa, short for Fédération Internationale de Football Association, which Mum said was too long for a dog’s name. Well, it’s an acronym for Fédération Internationale de Football Association, but we never spelt it in all caps. We sometimes shouted it in all caps, particularly when she was a puppy, out on walks, getting lost in the bushes that ran along the back of the pebble beach.

“FIFA! FIFA! FI—There she is! Where’ve you been?”

And she’d be back on her lead, visibly miffed, but accepting. She knew that you can’t run off chasing foxes and rabbits and expect to still have your off-lead privileges once you reappear.

Of course, she wasn’t really named after the international governing body of association football. She was born during the summer of the France 98 World Cup, when my brother and I could clearly think of nothing else. One of Mum’s students had come into school one morning in early June and announced that his dog was having puppies. It was just me, my mum and my brother in our tiny terrace house, our new home. There was just enough room for one more. A little one.

We went to meet the puppies the following afternoon, Jack and Jill as they’d been hurriedly christened. A couple of days later and Fifa (née Jill) was sat between me and my brother on the backseat of the car as Mum drove us home, our little family completed by a scruffy black not-yet-housetrained mongrel of unknown paternity.

The day before her arrival, I’d prepared a little box for her to sleep in, her new name and welcoming messages scribbled on every side. I wanted her to get used to her name and new home as quickly as possible.

My nana said, laughing, “Give over! She’s not going to fit in there. It’s tiny!” It was tiny. But so was Fifa. She fit the box perfectly… for a week or so. But she fit our little family perfectly for the next 14 years.

In the summer of ’98, football didn’t come home. Something much more special did.