Football lines split into two kinds: the ones about the game and the ones about a specific club. The generic ones are safe anywhere; the club ones are only safe if you already know their allegiance. Getting the team wrong is not a recoverable error.
Match day, the pub during a fixture, or a five-a-side sideline are the natural venues — anywhere the sport is already the conversation.
The golden window is the twenty minutes after a win, when everyone in the pub is friends. The material lands hardest on match day with the game as shared context; cold, mid-week, it needs a visible jersey or a dating profile that mentions a club. Learn their team before deploying anything club-specific — the wrong badge joke ends conversations that hadn't started.
Different code, same rules: the American football, basketball and hockey collections run on identical logic for different crowds.

