A few years ago, after an EFL Cup game, I was walking back to my car past the disabled parking. I heard a shout, looked down and could see someone who was in a bit of a pickle.

They were a wheelchair user with a specially adapted car. Except their car was in for a service and the garage had provided a replacement. The problem was it didn’t have the same adaptations, so they’d tied a rope to the driver’s side door so they could haul themselves into the passenger side, dismantle their wheelchair and stow it in the footwell before dragging themselves into the driver’s seat to drive home. 

They’d got stuck between the wheelchair and the passenger seat and needed help. I was the only person around, so I guess it was going to be down to me. There’s a longer version of this story as I tussle with my social awkwardness and they get increasingly frustrated at my inability to follow basic instructions which involved taking one of their shoes off and learning how to fold up a wheelchair.

I see this person frequently now, rolling past me at home games, and in away ends up and down the country, in midweek and at weekends. They won’t remember me; I’m just one of many able-bodied people who wouldn’t otherwise think twice about their existence. 

The story is a small example of what a football club can do. Without football, we wouldn’t have otherwise met; I’d have remained ignorant to the persistence and perseverance needed to live the life of a wheelchair user. 

We exist in different orbits, but despite our differences, for every game, without ever meeting or talking since, we share a similar goal and are equals in every sense. It’s the same in terms of bridging age gaps, class divides, cultural differences, gender differences. I don’t know how it does it, but a football club breaks all those things down. You may be someone with reservations about migration, but if a migrant is at a game wearing a yellow shirt, then your views of that person (and hopefully those similar to that person) are likely to change.

All of that would be lost without a football club, which is what was at stake on Thursday as Cherwell District Council sat to finally give the club planning permission to build the new stadium.

The mechanics of a planning meeting will be unfamiliar to most, including me, although I have some experience of dealing with committees. I was as dragged down and wound up as anyone, and went through several periods thinking the whole thing was tanking. It felt like we were placing our mortality in the hands of petty minded and poorly informed counsellors and there was nothing we could do about it.

But, there were some familiar traits. Essentially, when working with a committee, you put forward your proposal, as outlined by the heroic Laura Bell, Principal Planning Officer at the council, and wait for it to be kicked around by people less qualified than you.

It was easy to interpret the four hours of apparent criticism, triviality and negativity as a bad sign. Superficially, it looked that way, but we have an adversarial legal and political system which involves one group of people putting forward an idea and another group trying to destroy it. Some fans were frustrated that there were so few positives in the debate, but the positives were all contained in the proposal. If the idea survives the thumping and is still a good idea at the end, then it should go ahead as recommended. Ultimately, it’s democracy and it just about works. 

Quick political aside here, when political parties talk about getting rid of ‘unelected bureaucrats’ they’re talking about people like Laura Bell. The people who untangle the spaghetti of legislation, build the arguments and cases, and invest hours evaluating pros and cons. Without them power sits exclusively with the whim and biases of people whose only qualification is that a minority of people voted for them. Remember this when politicians promise to get rid of ‘unelected bureaucrats’.

Politicians have the right to have a view, it’s very normal for challenges to be coloured by petty personal preferences and it is part of the skill of the proposer to not be drawn into them. I once presented a risk register to a committee of experts and was challenged on my use of colour in the spreadsheet. It took twenty minutes to discuss which colours were helpful and then it was approved without any reference to the content of the spreadsheet itself.

Of course, there’s a degree of venality in all politics, but it works on both sides. In the end, questions about how the stadium would deal with specific and unlikely scenarios and the suggestion that the council become an authoritarian dictatorship and simply force Firoz Kassam to sell his own stadium were just glancing blows to a bigger fundamental.

Even Ian Middleton pretended to care about the future of the club, because he knows that football clubs are important and to dismiss them out of hand would be political suicide. As Laura Bell outlined, there’s lots about the development of the new stadium which is counter to normal planning rules, but a football club is an exception. 

I don’t know why we choose football as a vehicle for social cohesion and inclusion, but as Roland Clements’ testimony showed, it just is. The biggest town in England without a Football League club is Wakefield, which is twice the size of Oxford. Wakefield may be a great place to live, but its status, profile, sense of identity and purpose is not enhanced by the absence of a football club. At its simplest, a football club gives you a shirt which you can transport with pride beyond the city’s boundaries, into the county and around the world and it gives you an instant, unambiguous identity. While opposers focussed on matters of bricks and mortar and traffic flows, the wider ‘exceptional’ purpose of a football club cannot be denied. The only shock is that it’s taken the city this long to realise that and correct the historical mistake it made 25 years ago.

As the council’s votes showed, despite the reservations and concerns, the risk of killing the football club and the social value it generates was simply too great. We wake up this morning a different club to the one we were yesterday, we can suck in the clean air of having a future. Now we have the trivial matter of making all the promises and plans real.