When you support a football club, you get used to being one voice among many. You wear the shirt, you follow them through the good years and the bad, and you stand shoulder to shoulder with some who feel exactly as you do and plenty who do not. What you almost never get to do is take to the pitch in a team of your own, every player a fellow supporter.

This Sunday, a good few of us get to.

On Sunday 20 September we are holding our Supporters Competition at Newport Pagnell Town FC. Ten teams, all Over 50s, and each side is made up of the supporters of one club, out on the pitch together for the team they have followed all their lives.

Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham all have a side, plus others making up the ten. Picture a whole team of Everton supporters lining up against a whole team of Liverpool ones, or the Arsenal supporters against the Tottenham, every one of them old enough to know exactly what it means. The teams are split into two groups of five, working their way through the afternoon towards a final, with a trophy waiting for the winners at the end of the day.

It is a bit of fun, first and foremost, and it is meant to be. There is no league standing riding on it. But there is that trophy to play for, and old rivalries have a way of waking up when it is your club against theirs, even in the best of spirit. There is something about being surrounded by people who love your club as much as you do, all pulling the same way for once.

It runs from half past ten in the morning right through to six in the evening, so it is a proper day of it. Games rolling through the afternoon, ten teams all having a go, the day building towards its final, and men in their fifties and sixties still running out and enjoying every minute.

I still find it quietly remarkable that we can put a day like this on at all. Not so long ago the idea of getting one team of over 50s together felt like a good week’s work. Now we can fill ten of them, each one a club’s own supporters, on a single Sunday.

These are the days that remind us why we still love it.