What is religion?, part 2: why football doesn't measure up

[rug]

'For a lot of people the fate of their football team does affect them the way that God's good opinion is supposed to do.' Photograph: Carl Recine/Action Images

Andrew Brown
theguardian.com, Monday 2 September 2013 04.02 EDT

A perfectly reasonable question to ask of people like me, who define "religion" in a way that plays down theology, is why something like football should not be a religion. After all, it involves collective emotion, quasi-mystical experiences of loss of selfhood in a higher purpose, even if that is only to crush those bastards from the visiting team. If Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch is to be believed, it is also a way of coming to terms with the disappointments and tragedies of life. Going to a match with your estranged father has something of the effect that taking communion together is meant to have for Christians.

If you do a Google news search, in the months of an English winter, for terms like "miracle", or "messiah" many results will turn out to be about football matches. For a lot of people the fate of their football team does affect them the way that God's good opinion is supposed to do. All kinds of mental illness and unhappiness diminish when their team does well, and increase when it does badly. And then there is the Bill Shankly quote, that football isn't a matter of life or death, it's much more important than that: this, in itself, is a wonderful definition of the ambitions of religious truth – that it should be more important than life or death.

And yet football very clearly isn't a proper religion. And the reasons why cast some light on what religions are, or must be.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/02/why-football-doesnt-measure-up

Part 1 is here:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/26/what-is-religion-civil-state

Soccer isn't true football anyway.

[dimbear]

1. At first I thought hey, they both use pitches, but then I remembered there's no

laying on of hands in soccer.

[rug]

2. But there is a lot of aimless running around.

[Ron Obvious]

3. Soccer

Soccer isn't true football anyway.

Die, heretic scum!