Wait, watch, sulk, swear: There’s nothing like a new season in sport

Roger Hornsby, a baseball star a century ago, once perfectly articulated how the sports fan sees the world. In winter, he mourned, “I stare out the window and wait for spring”. It was when baseball resumed and life returned to a familiar sound and a bearable rhythm.

In different seasons, leaves fall, days lengthen and the rain sweeps in. It’s the sort of change sport understands. Life here, too, is broken into divisions of time, often known as pre-season, post-season, off-season and regular season, and we’re never the same as we journey through them. There’s life readying for football season and life during it. A world waiting for NBA rosters to be filled and then the shouting at the first basket.

The EPL football season is barely seven matchweeks old and we wonder who will win it all? Managers have barely tried tactics and are being labelled failures. Seasons feel more unforgiving than they once were and yet this is life till May – points tables, overreaction, glee, match nights, renewal, possibility, and coaching from the couch.

If you’re suitably pathetic you measure your life in these terms. There is the season you got married in and the one in which Teddy Sheringham topped the scoring charts. Your life is an accumulation of years but also seasons: the first involves ageing, the second involves hope.

Seasons test us because form is as ephemeral as smoke in a high wind. Most times you don’t win and yet you hold onto faith, sulking yet believing. One day, you swear... and then it comes. In 2004, when the Red Sox won a World Series after 86 years, general manager Theo Epstein understood the value of this winning season. “This is,” he said, “for anyone who ever played for the Red Sox, anyone who ever rooted for the Red Sox, anyone who ever saw a game at Fenway Park.”

The season is what you save for, money and leave, giving away time you could spend on books, theatre, family, to strangers on a TV hitting a ball. The season can be a selfish business, a long-distance love affair, which arrives at the cost of everything else.

Seasons must end so humans can be ranked and achievement measured against dreams. Then fields lie empty, like museums emptied of precious pieces. Arenas are repainted and this pause is vital. It is time for everything to grow. Even the grass.

Bodies are reshaped and ambition sharpened. Victor Wembanyama was impressive last season, but this? The mystery is part of the magic. The off-season feels secret for no cameras venture into offices where coaches refine squads nor do they often venture into practice courts where life is reduced to 200 daily three-pointers, 80 tennis serves, 45 penalty corner flicks, 60 bench presses, 11 x 400m sprints, two vomits, one tantrum.

This is when the enduring cement of a championship season is laid. Audrey Werro, undefeated in six 800m Diamond League finals in 2026, a season of shattering speed, told The Athletic recently that “to potentially break the world record, I just need more training”.

But sports get greedy, they stretch seasons and with it limbs by adding tournaments. Tennis’ season right now feels like a long, limping, exhausted stagger over the finish line. This game has got its season wrong. Fatigue dulls the watcher’s senses and the players’ skills. In cricket, matches abound and the results feel like a tired blur. It is dangerous for a sport when it starts to leave no memory.

Even migrating birds need rest and seasons exist to bring order to life. The off-season in sport is a deliberate waiting which builds suspense. What else is sport but theatre and so curtains must take their time to rise before they reveal an unknowable script, new actors and old hands.

Tiger Woods is at the range again, a repaired 50-year-old sinner with hopefully a new driver (I mean his car not the club), who recently posted this caption on Instagram: “Back on your feed, right where this swing belongs.” He can’t win another Major surely but everyone waits for him to play another one. April is six months away and maybe there will be another season of the Tiger.

Anticipation is one of life’s enduring pleasures, this wait to see a rebalanced Liverpool squad or an altered Carlos Alcaraz at the 2027 Australian Open or a faster Shanti Pereira. Next April is when Pereira’s first competition block starts yet her coach Luis Cunha says training resumes next week.

Her astonishing past is history and the future will keep demanding proof. Are you fast enough? The new season is examination and expectation, it is a rush and an adventure, it is a stopwatch reset and a starting gun reloaded. There is no power, is there, like new beginnings?