Save the entire 1987 QPR squad to the cloud: my mental Rolodex is too full of past players | Max Rushden

I managed to watch last Saturday’s Match of the Day without knowing the scores. It really is one of life’s enduring thrills. So the first time I’d seen or heard of Loum Tchaouna was when he picked up the ball in the 68th minute at Turf Moor, looked around a bit and thought: “Sod it, I’ll just whack it from here.” And how! What a brilliant way to introduce himself to my brain – which was perhaps not his ultimate goal; in this instance a goal was very much his ultimate goal.

By the time of this last-on-MOTD wonderstrike, I’d obviously spent the previous hour watching various other footballers at work – most of them pretty familiar. The odd one did require a cursory Google. Who is Eli Kroupi? Who are all these Chelsea players? Do they really have the same sized squad as all the other teams? If I was cloning footballers in a laboratory and slipping them into the Champions League squad, I’d call them Reggie Walsh.

After Tchaouna’s beauty, I decided against looking this guy up. Partly to just savour the moment, and partly for fear of great anticlimax. The fact he is playing for Burnley (no disrespect, etc) suggests his YouTube highlights reel won’t reach that level. They are so often set to slightly overenergetic Europop with some hasty cuts just before the player gives away possession or balloons one over the bar.

But to be deadly serious, maybe it was much, much bigger than that. At some moment between Kroupi and our friend Loum, had I reached my elastic limit of footballers? A limp spring, no more disk space. Manage storage, delete your WhatsApp conversations and your duplicated photos, save the entire 1987 QPR squad to the cloud. Give £3.99 a month to the man for another gigabyte. There is no room at the inn.

There are just so many footballers. They keep appearing, every year, younger than the last ones. Fifteen-year-olds in the Premier League, now born so recently that I haven’t heard of what was No 1 on the day of their birth because it’s too modern.

Perhaps this is what being old is. Looking around and just seeing a neverending procession of new people. Is it acceptable to demand new footballers do more than just one thing before I enmesh them into the Rolodex of players that swirls way too near the front of my brain? There’s a bouncer standing outside that particular cortex with a clipboard and an earpiece yelling “One in, one out” to an ever increasing line of teenagers in an array of Premier League football kits.

Max meet Eli, Eli meet Max: the Bournemouth forward celebrates his first goal against Crystal Palace. Photograph: MI News/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

More fruits of the Loum, if you will, and I’ll drop out Ian Juryeff, and bring you in. A bit like making friends when you’re 46. I’ve already got some good ones. I’m time-poor, exhausted and can’t face wading through small talk about siblings and whether you enjoy Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as much as I do. If you want to break into my top 50 now, you’ve frankly got to be extraordinary – and I’m not giving enough back to deserve that kind of effort.

It is curious that with footballers, you just add and add and add and never delete. This bulging, unaudited list … will it ever burst? There are probably podcasts and supplement takers on Instagram who tell you how to free your mind of worthless information like this so you can reach some kind of higher plane of existence. That is of course, if there is a higher plane than being able to recall the Crystal Palace starting XI in the 1990 FA Cup final – Gary O’Reilly and Phil Barber took me a while.

Depending on your vintage, your blank canvas may have been infiltrated in much the same way as mine. Dad relentlessly telling me about Gilzean and Greaves, finding common ground with Glenn Hoddle. More ingredients: add one packet of Top Trumps from Clive’s house. Martin Buchan, Gordon McQueen – always go height with McQueen, 6ft 3½in. Unbeatable – the taller the better for mid-80s Top Trumps. Diego Maradona was nothing; a high centre of gravity was key.

Regular listeners will know of my obsession with the unspectacular, solid, run-of-the-mill footballer, ideally of the 90s. I’m astonished that I’ve never written about it before (please don’t check). Stir in Panini 86 and 87. Norwich City. Kevin Drinkell, Dale Gordon, Wayne Biggins, Ian … Butterworth, Shoot posters all over my room of John Ebbrell and Nico Claesen.

Add to this the real-life players I saw at the Abbey. George Reilly, Steve Spriggs, Martin Robinson, Keith Branagan. And then an explosion of footballer after footballer zinging into my consciousness. TV: Saint and Greavsie, Football Focus, TransWorld Sport. Gary Mabbutt talking about diabetes on Zig Zag. Bobby Barnes missing penalties for Northampton Town on Anglia News. A video recorder! 101 Greatest Goals: Zico, Sócrates, the perplexing John Barnes. The Premier League on Sky – Teddy Sheringham for Forest, top right-hand corner in the first Super Sunday. Andy Sinton for QPR on Monday Night Football. An Amiga 500. Championship Manager 93. Steve Anthrobus is expected to move abroad at the end of the season.

Then season after season after season of players lodging themselves in my brain regardless of ability or longevity – just a magnetic pull into a synapse that should know better. Romário, Grant Holt, Riquelme, Billy Beall, Chris Marsden, Gus Uhlenbeek, Marians Pahars.

Blink and it’s Loum Tchaouna banging one in for Burnley in the autumn of 2025. Forty years of watching, thousands of names. If I’m lucky I’ve got maybe 40 more. Time to invest in a new hard drive to remember the next few decades’ worth.