Its chants, no matter how profane, are songs of praise, hymns sung by a choir of worshipers. A number of widespread fan chants — “When the Saints Go Marching In,” for example — are borrowed from Christian tradition.
It has its relics — major trophies, famously, are supposed to be touched only by those who have won them — its martyrs, its saints and its sacred spaces. Generally, only players and essential staff members are allowed in dressing rooms. The visionary English manager Vic Buckingham once told one of his players not to walk on the field except on game day: the turf, he said, was “inviolate.” (As the story goes, his response, sincerely: “No it’s not, it’s in green.”)
Players, managers, executives and, in particular, fans spend a considerable amount of time fretting over the state of the game’s soul, threatened as it is by rampant commercialization and its longstanding litany of sins: diving, playacting, spitting.
Sometimes, the subtlety of allegory is abandoned and that parallel is made more explicit. A banner at Old Trafford, the home of Manchester United Football Club, reads “MUFC The Religion.” There is a statue outside the stadium of the stars George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton, inscribed with the words “The United Trinity.”
The temptation, of course, is to dismiss this as mere pomposity, a gauge of soccer’s colossal self-regard. But the parallel is rooted in something concrete. Like faith, soccer requires devotion: the devotion to follow a team around a country, around a continent; the devotion to wake early, thousands of miles away, to see it play; the devotion to believe that this year, everything will be different, everything will be fine.
Like religion, soccer asks that its adherents learn their scriptures, the myths and the legends that are passed down from one generation to the next; it offers a holistic worldview, in which all events are parsed through a specific lens of belief.
