As part of “Believing,” The New York Times asked several writers to explore a significant moment in their religious or spiritual lives.
The green of a soccer field is not a precise shade. It is too vivid to be olive, too dark to be mint, too full to be emerald, too verdant to be sea. Nor is it constant. It sparkles in sunlight, glistens in rain, grows somber under clouds. At night, illuminated by the megawatt glare of floodlights, the color is so rich that it almost glows.
Its effect, though, never changes, never wanes. I thought this not long ago when I found myself walking, chin buried against the wind, to St. James’s Park.
That walk is one of English soccer’s great pilgrimages. Unlike most stadiums, St. James’s is neither hidden away on some bleak retail park on the fringes of a town nor tucked into a neighborhood, fenced in by neat rows of red brick terraced houses.
Instead, it sits right in the heart of Newcastle, nestled in England’s northeast corner. The stadium is elevated just a little over the city center, enough to dominate the skyline, to serve as both a symbol and a sentinel. On game day, as thousands of fans, all clad in Newcastle’s black-and-white jerseys, stream in its general direction, it feels as if it occupies the space where, ordinarily, a cathedral might be.
It can be easy to overlook its majesty. I had spent the day on another assignment, in the wild Northumbrian countryside, trying to piece together the mystery of who might murder a tree. The traffic had been terrible. I was late. It was cold, and raining, because it is always raining. Besides, St. James’s Park has long been familiar. It is a place, through work, that I have been dozens of times.
But once I battled my way through a thicket of fans and rushed inside, I saw the green of the field, lush and pristine, brilliant in the halogen light. That green is too elusive to have a name. But the feeling it produces is constant. For millions around the world, it is something approaching sacred. No matter where the field is, no matter who it belongs to, it is anticipation and thrill and hope, but it is also familiarity, and comfort, and belonging.
That soccer has always presented itself as akin to religion is obvious from the language of the sport. Faith is the metaphor of first resort: the game’s great stadiums are cathedrals, breakout stars are revelations and established ones are icons.
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.
Like the religiously zealous, people subsume themselves in their fandom. Social media is awash with accounts where the bio has the name of only a team or, increasingly, an individual player. Asked to distill the essence of their lives into a staccato sentence, a surprising proportion of the human population will come up with something like: “Husband, father, Arsenal, not necessarily in that order.”
Fans submit, but soccer provides. Teams give their adherents, no matter where they are in the world, a sense of identity and community. Something bigger than themselves. Something that can transcend obsolescence.
For decades, the BBC has broadcast the results of Saturday’s games, not just in the Premier League but down to the sixth tier of English soccer, as well as fixtures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
For many of the hundreds of places that warrant mention, no matter how briefly — Halifax and Yeovil and Arbroath and Haverfordwest — it will be the only time their names are spoken aloud by the national media that week, the only time the rest of the country considers their existence.
This matters. As society has grown both more fluid and more atomized, most of the building blocks of participatory civic life have crumbled.
Unions are struggling. Politics has become nationalized, and more polarized. Community spaces — libraries, leisure centers, working men’s clubs — have diminished. The industries around which so many towns were built have decayed, and with them the sense of pride of place and unified purpose that factories brought. Even television, music and film have fractured, shattered into a million pieces by the rise of on-demand content and streaming.
Soccer, and almost soccer alone, has proved not only resistant but ideally suited to thrive in this hostile environment. It is, now, a sort of cultural Esperanto, a pastime and passion to be shared not just with friends but strangers in Nigeria and Malaysia and Japan, too. It’s a shared language, one that can be immediately understood, instantly shared, anywhere in the world.
That’s why people seek it out. They travel around the world to chase that feeling — of belief and belonging. It has become, for millions, the principal source of identity, a claim to membership of a community. They brave the rain and show up, searching for the enduring wonder and comfort that come from that imprecise, ineffable shade of green.
Rory Smith covered soccer for The New York Times for eight years, first as chief soccer correspondent and then as global sports correspondent. He is now the football correspondent for The Observer.
Rory Smith is a global sports correspondent, based in the north of England. He also writes the “On Soccer With Rory Smith” newsletter.
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