I got a call last week from Jim White, a friend who works on the Guardian. He said he was acting as tutor to a bloke from New Zealand who was doing a PhD on football writing at Oxford. Could I spare some time to see him? It didn't somehow surprise me that someone might be doing research on football writing at Oxford. This is the modern world. Yes, I know it always is, but it's more modern than yesterday's, as it always is.

What surprised me was Jim acting as tutor. "You should get on to it, Hunt. It's really well paid." Like how much? "Like £25 an hour." Our window cleaner gets more than that, I said. "Joke," replied Jim.

About 25 years ago, I got a call from London University asking if I'd act as an outside examiner for someone doing a PhD on the Beatles. Her thesis was on their lyrics as poetry. At the time, I thought it was a wind-up, unable to believe that one of our older universities was allowing such a project. Now it's commonplace. The other outside examiner was Wilfrid Mellers, professor of music at York. The student's name was, it's come back slowly, that's it, Melodie Ziff. Brilliant name.

So Steve Braunias from New Zealand came to see me. Aged 40, rather dishevelled, very laid-back. He is doing a thesis on football writing, but it's not for a PhD. He's on something called a Reuters Foundation Scholarship at Green College. There are ten a year, for working journalists from all over the world. You did well to get it, Steve. "Not really," he said.

Most people put up boring topics, such as global warming or "whither the euro?". He thinks he was the first to suggest a thesis on football writing. That's what probably did it.

And what's your angle then, Steve?

"Fucked if I know."

He discovered football when he was aged eight at his primary school in New Zealand. Not by playing it. You got the strap at his primers if you were caught with a soccer ball in the playground. It had to be rugby.

"We had art on Wednesday afternoons, which we did sitting on the floor. The teacher used to spread out old newspapers to save us making a mess. They happened to be four-month-old airmail copies of the Daily Mirror. As the harsh New Zealand light came through the window, and I was bending down on my bony New Zealand knees, I noticed a photograph of someone called George Best. Christ, I thought, he's cool."

From then on, Steve found out everything he could about football, which was hard, living in New Zealand in 1968, with no games on radio or TV. Mainly he read comics such as Shoot and Tiger for Roy of the Rovers. "I still know the name of every player who played for Melchester Rovers for the next five years, and in my opinion,Vernon Eliot was the best left-winger they ever had . . ."

I thought he was fibbing, but he started reciting the teams till I stopped him. I was later showing him some of my priceless football treasures, such as my collection of England-Scotland programmes, and he was able to tell me all the scores, and scorers.

At 18, when girls and music came along, his obsession with football subsided. He didn't see his first proper game until 1990, when he came to London for five days as the escort of a handicapped girl who had won a competition in a magazine he was working on. "I parked her at the theatre to see a Lloyd Webber something, while I went to see QPR play Sheffield Wednesday. It was a religious experience."

This is only his second visit to the UK, but so far he's managed four games. This is research, funded by Reuters. He's been to West Ham and Southampton, loved both, and to Ipswich, which he didn't. "The ground was grubby, the people vile, the language appalling, all rancour and no wit. I also went to Edinburgh to watch Sunderland. That was excellent."

Hold on, Steve. Sunderland don't play in Edinburgh. "Yeah, so I found out. I was never good at geography. They looked quite near on the map, sitting in New Zealand. Luckily, I went the day before the match, so I got to Sunderland in time. I also met Princess Anne. She was sharp."

In Edinburgh or Sunderland? "No, Oxford. She came to open something at the Reuters Foundation. I was introduced to her, so I asked if she'd met David Beckham. 'Would that make me someone worth meeting?' she replied."

He's been going most days to the Bodleian Library, slowly working his way through its entire collection of football books, which comes to 237. "Their selection is strange. They've got only one volume of Gibson and Pickford's four-volume Association Football and the Men Who Made It from 1906, yet they've got Ure's Truly, Ian Ure's biography, which is awful."

I have all four 1906 volumes, bought at Sotheby's last year, which I was able to show him, but, alas, not the Ian Ure. But I do remember him. Steve tried to catch me out. These colonials.

He's loving Oxford. "It's so tender, as if it's built out of paper." But he is loving the football even more. He's noting down everything of interest, learning so much. Anthropology and linguistics, by the sound of it, rather than geography.

"My best overheard remark was at West Ham. 'I fink I dun it wrong, Ted.' I've been repeating it to myself ever since." He went off laughing, to get the train back to Oxford.

I'll think of Steve at matches to come. I like people who like football.

And I like to think we all live in the same global village.