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We know why looking after our health, saving money, or having a job are important issues. But we don’t know why football (soccer) is important. Before proceeding, I must clarify that I don’t particularly like football. But I probably don’t like it for the same reasons I don’t like many aspects of life, because football is like life itself. It is its perfect metaphor.
Mythologies
Let me explain: football, like life, fosters the prospect of success, but, like life, it frustrates at least as often as it rewards, and frequently much more. Like life, football has myths, cheating, mysteries (the offside rule), rich and poor, politics, foreigners, government, and even wars, like the one between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969, which broke out after a football match between the two countries. Any match between England (where I live) and Germany or Argentina is experienced here as a new battle between these countries, a new Normandy landing or Falklands War, which can only conclude with the just and expected victory that already belongs to the British as part of their historical heritage, or else it’s cheating (Maradona’s handball goal in 1986), or just plain bad luck, which is another kind of injustice (penalty shootout defeats against Germany in 1990 and 1996).
Speaking of wars, it is often said that football is a relatively peaceful sublimation of war. The disproportionate value that the nation has in the collective mind translates, when the World Cup arrives, into equally disproportionate expectations.
How Football Reflects Social Expectations and Behavior
In life, the one that happens outside the football stadium, we tend to do what is expected of us, and rarely do much more or less than that. We don’t like to contradict or disappoint. You could say, therefore, that in our day-to-day lives, we tend to win at home and lose away, like in football. Like us, footballers tend to do what is expected of them, and wouldn’t want to disappoint the public either at home or on away pitches, so they win at home and lose away. From a psychological point of view, this can be seen as a form of social compliance.
But the most striking parallel between football and the rest of our lives is the clumsiness of its narrative. Unlike a Hollywood film, a match ends at a random point, which is often frustrating from a dramatic point of view. The climax, if it occurred at all, may have happened in the third minute of the match, followed by a long stretch of unmitigated boredom. The narrative of life is also ugly and clumsy, with long and perfectly forgettable periods, randomly interspersed with moments of crisis, and a not particularly dramatic ending in a hospital bed. That’s why famous biographies never quite fit within the dramatic structure of biopic films, no matter how hard the script writers may try. That lack of dramatic elegance, the moments of boredom, frustration, and bad mood, interrupted by glorious and horrifying highlights, is the most important trait that football shares with life.
The Role of Hope in Football and Life
There is, however, another common factor: hope, which is imperishable. Hope is, according to the Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel, the love of life, and it nourishes our existence and our faith that our country will win the World Cup. We all share that hope. Even me, even though I don’t particularly like football.
