Based on a video lecture.
Video lecture: YouTube
After the World Cup in Qatar, the internet filled up with videos titled “Messi is God.” Lionel Messi scored twice in the final against France, scored his penalty in the shootout, had a genuinely brilliant tournament, led Argentina to victory, and permanently wrote his name into history as one of the greatest footballers of all time. Whether he has eclipsed Pelé and Maradona is a matter of debate, but that he has become an absolute expression of the game — that is beyond doubt.
I am not much of a football analyst, but when I saw the word “God” in that context, I felt the religious studies scholar in me wake up. Because why is it specifically football that gets compared to religion so often? Ronnie O’Sullivan made a maximum break of 147 in five minutes at the snooker World Championship — and as someone who plays a little snooker myself, I understand that potting even one ball in that game is difficult, and he potted them all in sequence. Yet Ronnie is called God far less often. Magnus Carlsen, the greatest chess player of the modern era and possibly in history, likewise. So why specifically football?
I wrote down several points that explain this resemblance.
Identity
Fans belong to a club, and that belonging is a certain form of identity. On match day you can easily tell a Spartak fan from a CSKA fan just by their club colours, because they identify closely with their respective clubs.
But a national team is even more powerful, because here it is not just a club playing but a specific country, a specific state, and two identities layer on top of each other: national and footballing. I discussed Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities at length in another video, where he shows that a nation is an imagined community, and religion is also an imagined community. And what we get is a third imagined community, namely football fans. No supporter of the Brazilian national team can claim to know all other supporters personally. But what an extraordinary identity it generates.
This is connected to the history of the sport, and also to the fact that for many children and teenagers around the world, football becomes the only way to make something of their lives. This, combined with the sheer mass scale of the game, is what generates such powerful fan identity.
Rituals
Rituals are what links football to religion. Songs, chants, specific patterns of behaviour that belong specifically to the fans of this club or this national team. Liverpool fans sing You’ll Never Walk Alone; Manchester United fans sing Glory Glory Man United. All of this together, combined with the identity I described above, produces religious phenomena in the form of football.
Symbolism
The club anthem, the crest, the totem animal, the mascot — people relate to these things in a special way. This should not be confused with totemism, which had deep evolutionary roots and belonged primarily to primitive societies, but a certain resemblance is there.
Altered States
Football can produce unusual states in fans: rapture, ecstasy, devastation. I cannot claim to follow football with the same intensity as, say, chess — I follow Russian chess players very closely, and especially Nepomniachtchi. But I understand the feeling, because I have experienced it myself.
People love beautiful stories. They love watching the great become even greater, when an absolute expression of something appears. That is exactly why the whole world was invested in Messi at this tournament. Or why I will follow very closely when Ronnie O’Sullivan attempts to win his eighth world title — that will be a beautiful story. And it is why I felt a sense of betrayal when Magnus Carlsen simply declined to defend his world championship title: we want to see the absolute expression, and this too is what links sport in general, and football in particular, to religion.
Many researchers compare the states that fans experience at a stadium to altered states of consciousness, and place them alongside religious experience. The phenomenological approach to religious studies is particularly relevant here: it does not try to explain where these states come from, but to understand and feel their inner nature, which classical religious studies as a scientific discipline cannot offer.
The Sacralisation of the Club
For fans, their team enters the sphere of the sacred. Insulting the club, the national team, or individual players can be perceived as an assault on something holy, and as justification for physical violence. Try insulting the Starostin brothers in front of Spartak fans — you will most likely get hit. This is very characteristic of team sports where a club is associated with a specific city, and the rivalry becomes especially sharp when several clubs share a city. Consider Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe in Istanbul, where the fighting has reached levels that our fans and even English fans would find surprising.
The Deification of Players
Individual players can be deified — and this is exactly what we are witnessing now in the context of Messi. Few people genuinely believe he descended from heaven to show us the beauty of football, but the narrative is extremely persistent. In Argentina there is even a church dedicated to Diego Maradona — an exceptional example, but a telling one. One author I read reaches this conclusion: religion has not left the modern world, it has simply moved behind the walls of stadiums and onto millions of television screens. Instead of the cross and the crescent, we today worship mortals who perform miracles with a ball.
What is interesting is that in modern clubs, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists play alongside each other, and fans love them regardless. In countries where in ordinary life there are enormous problems with the integration of migrants, representatives of those same peoples are received as heroes on the pitch.
Is Football a Religion?
No, it is not — and here is why.
Football lacks at least one essential feature of religion, namely a system of mystical or spiritual beliefs that relates in some way to the sphere of the superhuman and the supramundane. Football does not make claims about the general order of existence, and that is another feature of religion that I consider very important. Football does not try to explain how the world is structured and does not offer a recipe for getting out of a difficult situation, unlike, for example, Buddhism, which is often called a philosophy of life precisely because that is what it claims to provide.
The correct term for football is therefore quasi-religion, meaning a phenomenon that reproduces many features of religion — identity, rituals, symbolism, sacralisation, altered states — without being religion in the strict sense. In the same way, music, pop culture, and many other phenomena of contemporary life are quasi-religions.