Football and Faith: A Critical Perspective on Interpreting Sport as Religion

Abstract

Comparing football and its fan culture to religion has become a common trope in the last decades in newspapers, sports magazines, and scientific papers. The colorful stagings of fans, their often unruly behavior, and their display of passion resemble religious rituals and creeds. Thus, the analogy seems to explain actions that otherwise might appear strange if not irrational from the outside. However, as I will argue, attempts to analyze football as a religion tend to overlook that the concept of religion itself has undergone many permutations in the last centuries. Once, religion was a category reserved for Christianity. However, with colonialism, sociologists, scholars of religion, and cultural anthropologists began to subsume many creeds and rituals outside Europe under the category of religion. In a similar fashion, religion has helped social scientists come to terms with football fans as untypical modern subjects. Fans are loud and unruly, but when social scientists analyze their actions and social codes through the prism of religion, they suddenly appear less puzzling. However, with that in mind, I will ask whether analyzing football as religion might signify further changes in understanding the latter instead of offering an apt tool for understanding the former. In postmodern fashion, even football can be interpreted as religion, which may tell us more about religion’s broadening semantics than football’s sacralization.