I’ll admit it - I’m not really a football fan.

I don’t spend my weekends watching matches, but somehow, whenever England are in a major tournament, I find myself getting swept up in it.

Maybe it’s the sense of hope. Maybe it’s the excitement that builds as everyone starts to believe. Or maybe it’s because, for a little while, it feels like the whole country is united.

This year was no different.

Like so many others, I found myself hoping England would go all the way, but it wasn’t meant to be.

It made me think about how we experience loss.

Of course, losing a football match isn’t the same as losing someone we love or the end of an important relationship. But disappointment is still a very real emotion. It reminds us that we’d hoped for something different.

Sometimes we dismiss our feelings because we tell ourselves, “It’s only football.” But emotions don’t always work like that.

Hope is powerful. We invest emotionally in the things that matter to us, whether that’s a football team, a new relationship, a career opportunity or plans we’ve been looking forward to. When those hopes don’t become reality, it’s natural to feel disappointed.

One of the hardest things about disappointment is that we often want to move past it as quickly as possible. We tell ourselves not to be upset, to focus on the positives or to “get over it.”

But perhaps the healthier response is to acknowledge it. To say, “I’m disappointed, and that’s OK.”

Giving ourselves permission to feel disappointment doesn’t mean we become stuck there. It simply means we’re recognising that something mattered to us.

In counselling, we often talk about making space for difficult emotions rather than pushing them away. When we allow ourselves to experience disappointment with compassion, it tends to pass more naturally than when we criticise ourselves for feeling it in the first place.

Watching England lose reminded me that hope always carries a risk. We might not get the outcome we wanted.

But hope is still worth having.

Because without hope, we stop caring. We stop dreaming. We stop putting ourselves out there.

Life will inevitably bring moments of disappointment. But it will also bring new opportunities to hope again.

Perhaps that’s one of the most important lessons, not just in football, but in life.