One winter morning eight years ago, some old men were playing football outside Amsterdam. Hardly anyone was watching, except their own toddler offspring. In the canteen beside the field, very old men played cards and ignored the football. This was OSDO’s third team versus AFC’s fifth team.

But playing in defence for AFC was a familiar, Felliniesque dreadlocked figure. An old spectator remarked: “That could be Ruud Gullit’s brother.”

“It is Ruud Gullit,” said another spectator.

“Are you kidding me?” demanded the old man.

Then he took another look, and exclaimed: “He was in the Dutch team!”

Gullit, former European Footballer of the Year, still only 37 years old, was playing park football with mates. He wasn’t much good. At half-time his team trailed 0-5. Then a spirited comeback made it 3-5. Finally, with a minute to go, a cross reached Gullit alone in front of an empty goal. This was his moment. He tried to jump, but couldn’t even get off the ground, and as he contorted himself the ball sailed over his head. When the woman referee blew the final whistle, Gullit congratulated her, and then exclaimed: “The second half was better!”

Now that I am 38 and playing old men’s football myself, I can finally understand his pleasure. This is a new and better stage of life.

I realised I had to stop playing with young men after my team here in Paris, “Ireland”, made me 14th man out of 14 players for a grudge match against “Argentina” (really a bunch of Argentine expats). I was sent on with 20 minutes left to play, but exhausted myself even before the match ended. Mostly, I tried to kick Argentines but kept arriving too late. During my cameo appearance Argentina scored twice to win the match. I have in my life been humiliated more soundly in less time, but not often. Life is a series of disappointed expectations – that’s the narrative structure – and my body had gone first.

Googling myself the other day – a good way to keep up with current events – I found this comment online:

I played football for The Irish Embassy Team in Paris with Simon Kuper. He wasn’t that good a footballer was Simon and a little sure of himself if ye know what I mean. He was left on the bench this one game and he wasn’t happy and I thought deary me if ye know anything about football don’t have a strop when you don’t get picked for a Sunday league team that barely got 11 down each week.

It hurts me just to write this down. But the criticism is unfair. When this bloke saw me, I was 37. That’s so old that you can boast about how old you are. A grey-haired character I used to play football with challenged me once to guess his age.

“Seventy-four?” I asked.

“Forty-eight!” he said proudly. And he could still throw himself about like a blind maniac.

Now I’m like that. I play on Wednesday nights with a bunch of Parisians who are either old or bad or both. One of us, Max, known as “le président”, rents the pitch for €40 a year. We play five-a-side, or three-a-side if we’re short. And it’s brilliant.

In young man’s football everyone is trying to live up to an ideal of himself. That creates angst. I used to spend days after a game fretting over my errors. But when you’re old, you know you’ll never amount to anything. There is no future. Each game might be your last: I have incipient arthritis, and someone in another local veterans’ game recently dropped dead on the pitch. All that’s left is enjoying your moments.

When someone scores (21-18 is a typical result for us) he often wheels away cheering, and other people shout, “Superbe!” It’s like being eight again, but with an even better self-image, because the older you get, the faster you ran when you were young.

When someone blasts the ball into the street, someone else might comment “Djibril Cissé!”, in honour of the wayward French striker. Then we wait around, watching the women playing hockey on the next pitch, till a pedestrian throws back our ball. Then we applaud him. There are no fights – at our age, it’s too tiring. Instead, after you concede a goal you might pick up the ball, blast it into the sky, and then stand around waiting, watching the hockey women, until a passing pedestrian throws it back.

It’s a feeling of liberation that young people can’t understand. Soon after watching Gullit in the park, I asked his Dutch contemporary Frank Rijkaard, now coach of Barcelona, why he too was playing third-team veterans’ football outside Amsterdam. Surely Rijkaard, another great of the 1980s, then also only 37, could do better?

Rijkaard said: “We have a nice team, a team of friends, and for an hour and a half we chase, run, play football. Well, fantastic! And then you’ve sweated, and you go into the canteen and drink a beer and chat about the game. Often you have a nice opponent, have a joke. I have no aspirations to anything more.”

I have now reached that same state of Zen.

Simonkuper-ft@hotmail,com