First Thoughts on Sport and Religion
Reflections after a pilgrimage to see Leeds United at Wembley
It’s a commonplace among my friends — and beyond — that sport is a religion. When my Jewish friends who support Leeds United go to Elland Road, our home stadium, they refer to it as “going to church.” If that means sometimes they go to synagogue before lunch and then to “church” in the afternoon, so much the better. And, to the question, “Does your rabbi know you’re here?” comes the implicit answer “what s/he doesn’t know, won’t hurt her/him.”
There are indeed commonalities between sport and religion: a sense of belonging; belief in something greater than the individual; ritual dress and action; symbols; lore: and sometimes, if things go well, visible miracles on show for the faithful.
And, of course, in both sports and religion you have true believers, hangers on, people who love the rituals, people want to belong to something (anything), and people who just love the songs.
Like belonging to religion — or, for that matter, a nation — supporting a team can be passed down from generation to generation. It can be a source of conversations, continuity, and strength for a family, but it can also be the occasion for, on a family level, strife and, on a social level, sectarian divides and violence.
Of course, both sport and religion are also often the excuse and sometimes the amplifiers for the expression of violence or bigotry that already exist within society. But, if the current state of algorithmic user-generated-content platforms teaches us anything (and it’s quite possible they don’t), it’s that it’s pretty easy to drum up violent hate without either sports or religion.
These preliminary analogies apply only to team sports. Individual sports like tennis, golf, athletics have their own fervour but the fandom is not religious in the same way. And I’m coming to this from a basis in British football so I’d be interested to hear how other sports traditions align, or otherwise, with religion.
Two of the main differences between major league sports and major world religions come from their attitudes to location and fairness.
A significant cause of the growth in the support of major team sports was the movement of rural and non-local populations to the cities in the late nineteenth twentieth century in the UK — and slightly later in Europe and the US. Since borders are relatively historically contingent, I’d just call this mass immigration. Though it was not necessarily across national or linguistic borders, masses of strangers including distinct communities were coming to the major cities, like London, Paris, and New York.
Encouraged by local business owners who wanted to encourage quietude and calm, or at least channel, aggression, sports was a religion of place, a way of the local gods superseding the old village gods and uniting a new population. Or, as with divided cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Milan and Glasgow — a way of recasting those old gods of religion in new shirts and building new weekend churches to catch the sparks of affiliation.
But, 160 years on from the formation of the Football Association, the attachment to place has changed somewhat. In one-team towns like Leeds (or like many US cities) it’s possible to be a fan simply by living locally. My friend who moved to Pittsburgh a few years ago was told at her work that on Steelers game days the staff wore yellow — and it was definitely not a joke. But for my daughter who is a proud New Yorker, supporting Leeds United is supporting Leeds out of a sense of heritage, not of local pride. My Leeds United Americas brothers and sisters (numbering thousands of supporters around the continent) bring countless stories of affiliation as they watch the events at Elland Road. Whether they arrived for reasons of diaspora or relationship, whether charmed by a specific event or game, a particular player or charismatic leader, they have arrived at a team that is defined by — as our theme song goes “ups and downs.”
For most teams — and the excellently entertaining “Welcome to Wrexham” explains this while demonstrating the opposite — significant emotional investment comes with significant grief. For most of my children’s life, Leeds United have been in a lower division than their size, history, and budget would suggest they should be. Fittingly, perhaps, my daughter was with me on our big trip to Wembley only to see us beat our own record for number of playoff losses. In sport, unlike religion, there’s no certainty of solace, only a driving hope that next time will be better.
Interestingly, however, mass converts to globally successful teams, are now diminishing the importance of location. Of the thousands of Manchester City and AC Milan fans I witnessed converging on Yankee Stadium in July, many were either young or American or brought by the young American in their family. Listening to them, they have no connection to Manchester at all, save perhaps a desire to make a pilgrimage to the Etihad Stadium. And, soon, maybe, if markets dictate, “home” games won’t even be played at home.
As an aside, this new stadium itself (though by all accounts a thing of excellent design and utility) is a detachment from the team’s roots. Ironically for City — bitter enemies of Manchester United — their owners from the United Arab Emirates have paid to give the stadium the Arabic word for “United.”
Finally, fairness. Religions tend to have ethics that apply to life as a whole. Sports have rules (or laws) that apply only to the game itself and are intended as an explicit way of leveling the playing field on the way to winning the game. Despite the rhetoric of some public personalities, there is no simple “winning” of life so, in one way, the tension between winning and playing fair is much higher in sports than in life. Viewed differently, though, the stakes in life (food, shelter, safety) are much higher.
Despite rigorous marketing and patchy policing, it’s clear that many, perhaps most players, coaches, and fans do not apply the principles of fairness in sport to anything except the letter of the law within its most limited jurisdiction. The inspirational coach Marcelo Bielsa has won love from the supporters of teams he has coached by finding and extrapolating those sporting principles into life, but he is, sadly, a unique case. But, perhaps, that’s not such a difference between sport and religion if we judge them by the actions of too many of our Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu leaders.
Happy New Year everyone — let’s hope it’s a better one than the last.