Footballism - worship of the booted sphere!

By Barry Unwin February 1998
Delivered at Christ Church Fulwood

Putting football in perspective.

Last summer Sky TV ran a series of adverts about football. I’d like to start tonight by showing you one of them.

Football is an obsession. Listen to how Arsenal fan and author Nick Hornby describes it:

“It’s in there all the time, looking for a way out.

I wake up around ten, make two cups of tea, take them into the bedroom, place one on each side of the bed. We both sip thoughtfully, so soon after waking there are long, dream-filled gaps between the occasional remark - about the rain outside, about last night, about smoking in the bedroom when I have agreed not to. She asks what I’m doing this week, and I think (1) I’m seeing Matthew on Wednesday. (2) Matthew’s still got my [Arsenal] video. (3)…I wonder what he thought of Anders Limpar.

 And in 3 easy stages, within 15 minutes of waking, I’m on my way. I see Limpar running at Gillespie, swaying to his right, going down: Penalty! Dixon scores 2-0!…Merson’s back-heel flick and Smith’s right foot shot into the far corner in the same match…(And this, remember is a morning in July, our month off, when there is no club football of any kind.) Sometimes when I let this dreamy state take me over completely, I go on and back, through Anfield ‘89, Wembley ‘87…my whole footballing life flashing before my eyes.…

…The truth is: for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.” 

Whether consciously or not, most of us have something which we use to try to make sense of our lives. Tonight’s talk is all about those things. For Nick Hornby, the author of the book I've just read from, it is football. For the scientist, it could just as easily be a belief in his or her ability to design tests to discover the state of the universe. For the Christian it should be God.

Of course, real life is rarely as simple as; for there are few people who have only one pastime, one interest, one preoccupation. More often than not, it turns out that we’re a football fan, with a job in science, and we also happen to call ourself Christian. That each way of looking at the world makes different and often diverging demands on us is merely one of those things about being a late 20th century person that makes life so interesting.

Holding so many opposing factors in tension is difficult, and in most cases we tend to allow one of them to predominate, for example, football. Usually this isn't something we do consciously - as Alan Edge observes in his Faith of Our Fathers,

“Let’s face it, we all know it’s sad. The thing is, though, none of us have any say in it. It controls us and we can’t do the slightest thing about it. The worst of it is, none of us really want to anyway. I suppose it’s simply the way things are and I dare say if you stop and think about it long enough, it’s probably the way they have always been, ever since the time when that very first whistle blew.” 

What I want to do in this talk today is examine football, to try to understand why it is that it becomes so important to so many people. At this stage I should also lay my cards on the table. In case you hadn’t already guessed. I don’t come to this as an entirely dispassionate observer. I come to it exploring my own fandom: a relationship with Sunderland Assocation Football Club that has lasted for 20 years, far longer than any other relationship I have entered into out of my own volition.

What I am going to do is make a series of observations about football; about what it has meant to me, and to others. Hopefully my analysis will make some sense of planet football.

1. Cheer Up Its only a game!

“Cheer up, its only a game” is about the worst thing you can ever say to a football fan. The reason its such a bad thing to say is not because it isn’t true: football plainly is just a game. It is just 22 men kicking a bag of air around a field. But its also an awful lot more than that. Its something that people wind the strands of their everyday lives around - childhood, youth, work, friendships, relatives, experiences, memories - until football becomes inextricable from existence itself. The problem is, you have to be a football fan to see it.

So let’s dispense with some stupid preconceptions first of all. Football is not about entertainment. I know television sells it as entertainment, but that’s because entertainment is all television can do. To the real football fan, football is about winning. Winning is all that matters. To be sure, winning within the rules is better than winning without them, and there are very few teams that consistently aim to win without them, but winning always remains the aim of the game.

On Tuesday evening of this week I visited Sunderland’s Stadium of Light to see our 4-1 victory over Reading. It was a good, entertaining game, but in the 20th minute, when Sunderland went ahead, I’d have been happy for the ref. to blow full time there and then. A 1-0 victory would have been enough for me. I’m not concerned with being entertained, just with winning points.

Nor is football an artistic statement. When an artist wants to communicate something they take a canvas or a piece of metal or stone, and they reshape it into a striking and often beautiful form. When a football team is successful, they often do it by avoiding a striking beautiful form. For many years West Ham United have been known as a team that play attractive, intelligent, fluid football. In that time they have won virtually nothing except admirers. Contrast them with Arsenal - of  “Boring boring Arsenal” fame. In the last 10 years Arsenal have won championships and cups and few admirers beyond their own fanbase. In football, success and beauty rarely go together - though to be fair - the current Manchester United team combine the two in a way that even the most begrudging fan can’t fail to admire.

Nick Hornby sums it up like this:

“In 1969 I saw George Best play, and score, for Manchester United [against Arsenal]. The experience should have been profound, like seeing Nijinksy dance, or Maria Callas sing, and though I do talk about it in that way sometimes, to younger fans, or those who missed out on Best for other reasons, my fond account is essentially phoney: I hated that afternoon. Every time [Best] got the ball he frightened me, and I wished then, as I suppose I wish now, that he had been injured. And I have seen Law and Charlton, Hoddle and Ardiles, Dalglish and Rush, Hurst and Peters, and the same thing happened: I have not enjoyed anything these players have ever done [against Arsenal] (even though I have, on other occasions, grudgingly admired things they have done against other teams.) Gazza’s free-kick against Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final at Wembley was simply astonishing, one of the most remarkable goals I have ever seen…but I wish with all my heart that I had not seen it, and that he had not scored it. Indeed for the previous month I had been praying that Gascoigne would not be playing…” Football is not entertainment: for let’s face it,  “…Who would buy an expensive ticket for the theatre and hope that the star of the show was indisposed?” 

If we want to understand what football means to the fan, we have to forget about entertainment and art.

2. A whole new story

The best way I can explain what football comes to mean to a football fan is to show you a clip from the film Fever Pitch. Its a clip from early in the film, when Paul, the film’s narrator, attends his first match. He comes from a broken home and football becomes a medium that he and his father can communicate through.

[You'll have to rent the video I'm afraid...]

First and foremost, football is a language; one which all people, irrespective of age, and gender, can use. To the uninitiated, football chatter can sound pointless and banal, a complete waste of time. For after all, what could be more absurd than spending hours in a pub or a cafe discussing whether John Salmond is useless or not?

And yet actually, this football chatter can often be very very important - for it exercises parts of our brains and communication skills that would otherwise never be used. Umberto Eco, the Italian academic and writer, sees debate about sport - and particularly football - as a substitute for political debate which is too complex for the average man to understand.

“Instead of judging the job done by the minister of finance for which you have to know about economics, among other things, you discuss the job done by the coach; instead of criticising the record of Parliament you criticise the record of the athletes; instead of asking difficult and obscure questions…you ask if the…decisive game will be decided by chance, by [skill], or by [tactics]. Talk about soccer requires, to be sure, a more than vague expertise, but all in all, it is limited, well-focused; it allows you to take positions, express opinions, and suggest solutions, without exposing yourself to arrest, to loyalty oaths, or…suspicion. It doesn’t oblige you to intervene personally, because you are talking about something played beyond the area of [your control]. In short, it allows you to play at [power] without all the sufferings, the duties, the imponderables, of political debate.” 

 In a very real sense then, football chatter becomes a substitute for real debate (and quite possibly real involvement too).

Football chatter got Paul and his dad talking at a crucial stage of their lives. I guess it was much the same with my father too. Indeed most of the relationships I formed at school and then at university and then in the workplace, were built around the common ground and shared concepts that football chatter thrives on. Like it or not, it is useful.

3. A transforming experience.

The third observation I want to make about football is that it involves an almost universal transforming experience. Listen to this comment from a father of a fan taking his son to Sunderland’s magnificent new Stadium of Light.

“Climbing the bleak concrete steps I try to imagine what the ground will be like. What if it’s a big let-down? We eventually emerge at the top and look down. It’s worth the ticket price just to see the smile on my son’s face. A 15 year old male smiling! In fact he’s grinning from ear to ear - can’t help himself, even when he catches me looking at him.” 

When you walk into a football stadium you enter a different world in which all the standard rules of behaviour and normality are suspended. Stand me in a crowd of 40,000 at Meadowhall and I’ll scream and want to run away. But transfer us all to a football stadium and something changes; something magical.

But it isn’t the crowd that does it. People talk about the experience of community you get at a rave or in a nightclub. Football is a bit like that, but much less individualistic and a lot more focused. You see the magical thing about football is that the game only becomes meaningful because the crowd are there. For if you take away the crowd, what difference is there between, say, Sheffield Wednesday and my works team? After all, they both play in South Yorkshire; they both play at a stadium; and they’re both rubbish. So what’s the difference? The difference is that thousands of people choose to care about Sheffield Wednesday.

One way of thinking about it is to see football as a context in which watching becomes doing. When a goal is scored on the pitch, the pleasure the fans feel is not some watered down version of the pleasure the players feel, but the same as that of the players. In other words, when fans celebrate a goal, they celebrate their own good fortune, not that of the scorer. As a result, the players become the representatives of the fans; a status they enjoy only because the crowd choose to give it to them.

4. The crowd.

Which brings me to my 4th observation; the crowd. In the video clip I showed before, there was a scene before the match in a cafe where Paul and his father sit talking to some other Arsenal fans. Did you find it a little bizarre? I ask this, because I can’t really think of any other sphere of life where a group of strangers would sit down together and start expressing such strongly held opinions.

Fellowship and camaraderie is something sadly lacking from modern living. The twentieth century has proved to be one of the loneliest, most individualistic eras in the history of the West. We may have all the food we can eat and all the technology we can afford, but all too often we keep it to ourselves. Through family breakdown, our increased dependence on the car, the loss of mass-employment industries and the destruction of the communities they supported, we suddenly find ourselves alone.

Football is one of the few places we can go to get an antidote. Of his first visit to a football match, Nick Hornby comments

“From where I was sitting I could probably have counted 20,000 heads; only the sports fan can do that. My father told me that there were nearly as many people in the stadium as lived in my town, and I was suitably awed.”  

I know exactly what he means - last Tuesday I sat in a crowd of nearly 41,000 at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light - that’s about 15% of the whole city’s population - an absolutely incredible number of people.

5. Commitment.

As Paul and his dad retreat from the game they get into a good natured discussion about a player called John Salmond; a discussion his dad knocks on the head by saying “One afternoon of football and you think you’re Kenneth Wolstenholme” (He’s a football commentator.)

So far everything I’ve said about football has been about how it strikes you; about how it seems so grandiose and worthy. But talk to any football fan and you soon discover that it isn’t just about what it gives to you. To become truly worthy of being labelled a football fan, you have to become worthy of it - almost always by suffering.

Being a football fan isn’t easy. It takes years, but if you put in the hours you gradually begin to feel worthy of your team and your fellow supporters. I reckon that I’ve seen at least 260 Sunderland matches since I got really keen in 1984. That’s about 20 games a season for 13 years - 9 of which I lived more than 100 miles from the ground for. As far as Sunderland go, I know I’ve put in the hours. I’m quite self-righteous about it - although I know there are Sunderland supporters who are those who are even holier than I am: people who would call me a part-timer. People who go to every game home and away, people who go to reserve games and youth team matches.

Harry Pearson charts this obsession in his book The Far Corner, a book dedicated to football in the North East.

“[Everywhere you went in the pubs and clubs of the region you were accosted by] angry men eager to compare attendance figures. ‘Did you see that?’ they spluttered. ‘They’re top of the [Premier League] and they only got 22,134! We’re sixth from bottom the first, and we got 4,000 more!’ They’d pause for a moment, their cheeks flushing, ‘See what I mean? See what I’m saying?’ And I did. What they were saying was that more people in the North-East were prepared to pay to watch failure than would pay to watch success elsewhere. It was a boast peculiar to football, like bragging that you had continued eating at the same cafe every day for 25 years even though the food was [rubbish]…To football fans, loyalty is the most important thing…[It] is the only subject that can induce a [man] to [boast] about his fidelity.” 

Now fidelity to a team like Manchester United or Liverpool is relatively easy. After all, when your team wins every week, what reason have you to ever doubt them? But with a team like Sunderland, who don’t win every week, its sometimes a little harder.

When I started supporting Sunderland they were in the middle of one of their bleakest runs ever. You’ve heard the old joke about a team that could play all night without scoring? Well for 7 horrible weeks between November 27 1976 and February 11th 1977, we were that team. We went 10 games - that’s 16½ hours - without scoring - a lean time to end all lean times. This perhaps make it all the stranger that it was the time my dad chose to start taking me to football matches.

6. Handing on the faith.

There was a poster advert that appeared in the middle of last year which said something like “Every father’s worst nightmare: ‘Dad, I like rugby.’”  The poster celebrates one final feature of football fandom that has to be examined: the desire to pass on the ball to the next generation.

One of my fears about having kids is that they won’t grow up to be Sunderland fans. I’ve thought a lot about this - nearly as much as I have about how to introduce them to Christianity - and I can see three possible situations developing. The first, and best, is that they become Sunderland fans like me. The second is that they grow up supporting the team nearest where we live. This is acceptable to me as it is fairly unlikely I’ll live in the North-East in the near future, and at least it should guarantee some good arguments - though I’d find it hard to cope if they were seduced by the dark side - Manchester United. The third position is that they won’t like football at all. It is this I fear the most. I’d hate to find myself echoing Alan Edge’s confession:

“…The fact is…I have failed to pass on my faith. The very life force which has sustained me and my forefathers since time immemorial will die with me. Neither of my children are the weeniest bit interested in football. They can’t stand it. In fact so pronounced is their contempt for the game that they don’t even…like Gary Lineker - the man’s virtually a saint for [goodness] sake - even Nick Hancock likes him.” 

Putting Football into Perspective.

Now there comes a point in any story where you have to begin to wonder what the point of it all is. What I’ve tried to do so far this evening is set out a reasoned argument for why so many people find football so attractive. But I’m conscious that I’ve only shared half the story.

In the 1970s, BBC ran a series of comedy programmes called Ripping Yarns. One of them concerned an escape attempt by a prisoner in a German POW camp during the Second World War. The joke of the show was that the prisoner became so obsessed with digging a tunnel to escape the compound that he failed to notice that the war had ended. Football has something of a similar effect on you; it blinds you to other things that are going on in your life; things that are often more important.

In sharing all that football means to me, I’ve neglected to mention something that puts it all into perspective; I am a Christian. I mention this because up to this point you could have been forgiven for thinking that I was an obsessive football fan. Two things happened in my life to spare me from that.

(1) Learning to love Lawrie McManyEnemy

The first occurred during Lawrie McManyEnemy’s second season as Sunderland manager. Between our defeat by Grimsby and our defeat by Wimbledon I went away with a group of Christians from my school. To explain just how unlikely an event this was, I should add that I was one of those atheist kids of agnostic parents who had no real contact with Christianity from the moment he walked out of Sunday School aged 4, to the time aged 16 he finally grasped what the Christians were on about.

But before I grasped what they were on about, I had to ask some questions of myself. For a start, the whole basis of the fellowship and friendship that the Christians offered me was totally different to anything else I had ever experienced; even at a football match. Whilst I might share a joke with the man next to me on the terraces, or indulge in idle football chatter with my school friends, the Christians went out of their way to find out about me, to make me feel accepted and valued. It was notable too that their conversation seemed to be about things that really mattered; things like right and wrong and life and death and war and suffering and so on. Much as I loved football, I yearned for something real, something that wasn't just, as Umberto Eco put it, “a substitute”, for something much harder to comprehend.

In among these big concepts, the Christians often talked of hope. I knew of hope from watching football. At the start of every season I set out on a journey hoping my football team would get better rather than worse. Usually by about the 3rd month of the season I knew which it was, and because Lawrie McManyEnemy was our manager then, I had already written off the season, and was actively looking for reasons why next year might be better. This is what hope is to the football fan: the hope that next year, despite all the evidence, your football team might just improve. The hope the Christians talked about was quite different. Gone was the torture of Fever Pitch (“I can’t work out whether life is rubbish because Arsenal are rubbish, or vice-versa”), and in its place was a fairly humbling suggestion that life is rubbish because people are not very nice. This made sense of my life, and made sense of much of what I saw around me.

Then there was the whole basis of my value to God. As someone who pretended to know enough about Christianity to dismiss it out of hand, but who actually knew nothing about it, I believed that the way to be accepted by God was to do enough good things to outweigh the bad things. This seemed a simple enough strategy; it appealed to my vanity and of course it embodied everything I knew about being accepted as a football fan: for what is going to Cambridge Utd away in an Anglo-Italian Cup Tie but an attempt to earn status? Christianity seemed to me just another club I could join if I could earn enough credits - or whatever it was they measured it in.

In addition what little I did know of Christianity seemed to suggest to me that earning these credits was incredibly difficult. It involved loving not only your neighbour, but your enemy too. It involved cleaning up your language and your fantasy life. It involved abstaining from sex before marriage - though admittedly as a fat spotty 16 year old who didn't know any girls - I wasn't doing so bad on this front. But on the others, I knew I was appalling. Cambridge away was easy compared to loving Lawrie MacManyEnemy.

Success and failure were another problem for me. Football has a very simple moral code about hard work and gentlemanly conduct; a code which isn't exactly adhered to rigidly. As a fan, I suppose I copied many of its principles and precepts. If I did something wrong, I tried to get away with it. If the ref. (or my parents or the police) turned a blind eye, then so what? The problem was, some of the things I thought about, and did, seemed significant enough for me to find “then so what” an utterly inadequate answer. If you like, the same something inside of me that demanded justice on the football field, demanded it in other parts of my life.

It was then that I encountered an entirely different understanding of Christianity to the one I’d always assumed was true. For a start, it turned out that I was right in thinking that I was never going to be good enough to earn the right to join the Christian club. But this was only half the story - for I then learned that God still wanted to have something to do with me despite my wrongdoing; and that he had made it possible for me to join the club without having to earn my way in. In short, I learned that membership was promised to anyone who was prepared to ask for it. Pilgrimages to Cambridge Utd away simply weren't relevant here; in the Christian club they accepted me because simply because I didn't pride myself in my track record.

Once I understood that it all became plain. I didn't have any trouble accepting that there might be a God. After all - I lived quite comfortably putting my trust in Sunderland’s goodness. To do something similar to a God who I became confident had acted in human history seemed if not totally reasonable, then certainly more so than blind faith in myself or Sunderland football club.

So somewhere in one of the bleaker moments of Lawrie MacManyEnemy’s 2nd season I became a Christian - incidentally for those of you looking for a more conventional dating system - that was January 1987.

2. Toppling the icon

Now as I mentioned before there were 2 events that have saved me from being an obsessive fan. That was the first. The second took place 4 miles from here at Hillsborough Stadium on 5 April 1992. I was there to see the FA Cup semi-final between Sunderland and Norwich. If you know you’re football trivia you’ll know that Sunderland won 1-0 despite being a division lower than Norwich in the league and having a team made up of has-beens and useless youngsters.

As you can imagine, the scenes at the end of the game were absolutely amazing. After years of famine suddenly we were on the verge of getting something back from the club. I stood hands raised in the air, singing and dancing with delight. It was without a doubt the happiest moment of my life.

And yet as I came away from the ground; as my elation diminished; I began to wonder whether there wasn't something wrong in how I’d responded. As I reflected on what I’d been doing I realised that for the entire game the total focus of my whole being had been aimed at willing Sunderland to win.

Think back to what I said before about how for the football fan, watching becomes doing. That whole process is about creating meaning and purpose in an otherwise meaningless activity. Its about investing your emotional and spiritual energy into making the team into what I can only describe as a totem or an idol through which life can be experienced.

Even as the saved, but not-very-committed, Christian I was then, I knew that there was something about this that was wrong. At the start of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses addresses the people of Israel as they are about to enter the Promised Land. To set it in context; the Israelites had lived in slavery in Egypt for many years and had cried out to God to be rescued. In response, God appointed Moses to lead the people out of Egypt; and then for 40 years they wandered in the desert - rescued - but unwilling to trust God enough to complete there journey. As I walked out of Hillsborough I found myself in exactly that position; I knew I was saved; but I also knew I wasn't prepared to trust God enough for me to really begin living. The problem was I had an idol.

Listen to what Moses said to the people:

“…Be careful not to forget the covenant of the Lord your God that he made with you; do not make for yourselves an idol in the form of anything the Lord your God has forbidden. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.
After you have had children and grandchildren and have lived in the land a long time - if you then become corrupt and make any kind of idol, doing evil in the eyes of the Lord your God and provoking him to anger, I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you this day that you will quickly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess. You will not live there long but will certainly be destroyed. The Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and only a few of you will survive among the nations to which the Lord will drive you. There you will worship man-made gods of wood and stone which cannot see or hear or eat or smell…” 

Humans are a scattered, rebellious people. We may not be the direct physical descendants of the Israelites, but it is perfectly possible to draw parallels between what is predicted for Israel and how we live today. We may not worship metal or wooden-carved totems, but we do worship other man-made objects: things of wood and stone and metal and leather. We organise our lives around money and career and football. Fashion, image and even trains come to dominate our waking hours. As consumers we treat the whole world as something to rape and pluck for our enjoyment. All too rarely do we organise our lives around the jealous all consuming fire of a God who promises rescue if we turn to him. Even the Christians don’t do this.

But the point Moses concludes this bit of his sermon with still stands: “…If from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul.”  God is always ready to forgive us if we seek him out.

As I walked back from Hillsborough that day I resolved to re-examine the way I worshipped Sunderland football club. I started to try and find ways of supporting without worshipping; of shouting encouragement without throwing myself so wholeheartedly into our battle hymns. It will be something I carry on doing until I stop supporting Sunderland or I die; when of course I’ll want my ashes scattering on the pitch.