As I write, Leith Athletic FC are gearing up for their World Cup Football Festival at Meadowbank Sports Centre; a tournament for over 650 kids from across the city, promising such added enticements as face painting, an ice cream van, a fire engine, and a merch stall selling, among other classy monochrome items, the famous Eduardo Paolozzi Leith Athletic shirts.

So far on the world stage we’ve won one/lost one, and tonight face Brazil for only the second time in my memory, the first being 1998, two years into Leith Athletic’s resurrection, when any reverent mention of Ronaldo meant only one man. These days our Leith Athletic kids dream of being the next Vinicius Jr. or Martinelli, but the LA men’s team, currently playing their semi-professional home matches at Meadowbank and competing in the East of Scotland Football League, offer them something perhaps a little more achievable to reach for, wearing, as they do, the same black and white striped strips, and training in the green shadow of mighty Easter Road Stadium on the same turf-burn astro.

Having a kid at LA is as much a team sport as any other, requiring complete devotion to your child’s development and abandonment of any kind of social life other than that which you get pitch side. We are rewarded with continuous coaching and matches facilitated by the army of volunteers who make it possible, from when the kid is knee-high to a football, until they are old enough to have families of their own.

My eleven-year-old (LA 2015’s) has benefited from this system for 6 years. My dad, in his eighties and not a footballer, remembering a Boness childhood short on cash but rich in resources, questioned if his grandson was getting a rounded enough education what with devoting every extra-curricular minute to football: why wasn’t he pulling trout out a burn using lures he’d made himself from the feathers of dead starlings and bits of string he’d found in carless streets?

Why? Because not only do our kids live in a plastic landscape where the streets no longer offer up these treasures – they live in a digital one, where the pull of electronic dopamine devices is just too strong to resist. But guess what also stimulates dopamine? Okay so no trout in football - but friendship, fresh air, camaraderie, listening skills, patience, dedication, fortitude, coachability, discipline, and the ability to endure and even relish any heavy weather the sky can throw at you – these gems are all there for the taking.

The 2015’s are a multicoloured, multicultural group with a head coach and general manager who can’t be getting much sleep as is the price of always doggedly pursuing the best for the kids in their care. As well as football, every season our kids get new strips, day trips, Christmas parties, end of summer term ice creams and a whole lot more. Other year groups surpass us in terms of the gender split, however, the only girl in our group Pavishka Senthilkumar (Pavi), is a tenacious, rock-at-the-back defender, who, though she signed for Hibs several years ago, still chooses to come train with her friends - our LA boys. Which speaks volumes about what she finds here.

April saw our 2015 kids drafted as ardent elfin ultras for the Leith Athletic under-15’s in their Scottish Cup Final against Eastside Rapids. Bussed into Broadwood Stadium chaperoned by their coaches, our bairns had a grand day out despite the loss that ensued. If football being a cruel mistress is a lesson Leith kids learn on repeat, they also know what it is to persevere, and a few weeks later the same The under-15 team beat the same opponents to lift the South East Region Cup.

Like every large group we are imperfect. We are individuals with different belief systems, experiences, and points of view – some are even jambos - yet all carry the weight of our own primal fears for our kids. We also share the capacity for joy, the tendency towards hope, and a common goal - that our kids will thrive, be safe and happy. Our badge is Leith’s coat of arms, depicting St Mary Star of the Sea, alone, but for her infant son in her arms, cast adrift in a little two masted boat on rough waves, feeling, I imagine, how we all do at times. This world is not safe for children, a fact we see reflected back to us in the sheen of the #168 gold pins worn by the Iran national squad arriving at World Cup base camp in Mexico, worn in tribute to the little girls killed in a strike on their school in the ongoing war.

The Leith Athletic World Cup Festival tournament in celebration of our pearl anniversary will be the stuff of happy hazy childhood memories which all kids deserve. Pearls, like children, are inherently soft and prone to becoming more brittle over time if exposed to bad air, extreme temperatures, and chemicals, but with proper care and maintenance they can last for generations – much like our football club.

Leith Athletic is community and identity – somewhere to belong. While the volunteer backroom staff and coaches of grassroots clubs like Leith Athletic continue to pursue the ideal of a great club, and the kids and their families keep turning up again and again, where we all have a safe place to be.