A Brief Theology of Sport

Introduction

A Question of Sport

I love it when Arsenal play at home. Last Saturday was no exception. First, I met my friends in a local pub. The starting line-up was discussed, the opposition reviewed and the tempting odds on victory confidently embraced. Then soon enough, like agitated atoms in a cyclonic swirl, we left the pub to join the 60,000 other fans making their way to the ground. Amid the colourful sea of hats, scarves and replica shirts, we marched under a railway tunnel – cue echoing chant, ‘Red Army, Red Army’ – and past programme sellers, fanzine sellers and all sorts of merchandise, before finally reaching the densely packed bottleneck: security, stewards, slow clunking turnstiles, and then at last inside: the bright dazzling pitch, the titanic noise, the players emerging, the volume increasing, the whistle blowing, the match kicking off. Football, I love it.

To be honest, the game was nothing special. A dour opposition attempted to crush our creativity to protect their scoreless draw through the regimented process of sterile hoofing, persistent fouling and the strategic wasting of valuable time. Nevertheless, the game still worked its magic. Time and space went all funny, the intensity of life somehow compressed into 90 minutes, stretched across an emerald pitch, as I was strung between a moment all anxious and tensed, miles from my worries, miles from my cares, the immediacy of the game somehow gripping me, absorbing me, with all its twists and turns, swift darting movements and subtle fleeting passes that merge and break, undetermined and free as the game suddenly explodes: Alex Song to Van Persie who volleys . . . ONE NIL . . . and we all go ballistic, leaping and hollering, bouncing and shouting, punching the air in the purest delight. Football, there is nothing quite like it.¹

The game ended soon enough, and I was transported – crushed onto a Tube train – back into the pressurized space of everyday life. But while the 22 players changed into designer clothes before climbing into splendid cars to drive off towards magnificent mansions, I found myself wondering what it was I had witnessed. Nothing had been produced. Nothing had been harvested. The game had simply begun and it had simply ended. It was a passing event that left no mark on the world in which we live. Of course, Arsenal had won three more points. But these three points – to be celebrated nonetheless – held no real value beyond the self-contained universe of the league in which we play. I also knew the players had become richer, while my friends and I had grown somewhat poorer, but the professional game’s perverted finances are not its purpose; money is secondary, auxiliary at best. And so it was – squashed inside a train carriage – that a nihilistic wave washed over me: the game is pointless; it is for nothing, it holds no purpose. Yet, for some strange reason, this knowledge did not bother me. In fact, it made me feel even better. Football, it really is a funny old game.

II

Arsenal play their football in the English Premier League. The league runs from August through to May each year. It is made up of 20 professional clubs, which are drawn from towns and cities across the length and breadth of England.² Every year each team plays the other teams twice, both home and away, with points being allocated in line with results, each result determined by the scoring of goals and each goal scored though a complex mix of skill, mistakes and random chance. By the end of the season, the team that has the most points is crowned champions (unless, if points are tied, goal difference settles it).

The Premier League is incredibly popular. A vast number of fans now watch it, as well as a growing company of corporate spectators whose unwanted presence epitomizes the unsociability of corporate extravagance. This year for example, during the 2011–12 season, over 13 million tickets were sold for the 380 games, a startling figure which produces an average crowd of around 35,000 per game.³ Given the finite number of seats available, this figure constitutes something of a sell-out, with the imperial laws of supply and demand making match-day tickets pricey and quite difficult to get hold of. At Arsenal, for instance, the cheapest season ticket now costs a fraction under­ a thousand pounds. Despite this financial hurdle, people still queue up to pay. Whatever its shortcomings, the English Premier League is clearly popular.⁴

There are many ways to explain the popularity of the Premier League. For example, the games are endlessly promoted through mainstream (and niche) media outlets, with aggressive marketing and constant self-aggrandizement.⁵ But behind the glamour and glitz of the marketing gimmicks, the underlying reason for the league’s popularity should not be overlooked. The Premier League is popular, because football is popular.

This simple equation explains why there are over 37,000 football teams here in England. Some of these teams are on the fringe of the Premiership, making up the second, third and fourth tiers of the professional game. But the overwhelming majority of these teams are amateur, performing Saturday-by-Saturday and Sunday-by-Sunday in parks and pitches across the land. The Football Association – the game’s governing body in England – estimates that over 7 million people play the game on a regular basis in this country. That is 4 million children and 3 million adults. Given that the population of England – including the elderly, infirm and babes-in-arms – is around 51 million, 7 million is a sizeable chunk. It means that around one in seven people are playing football on a regular basis in England. A simple hypothesis suggests itself: the English love football.⁶

Of course, the English are not alone. Football – or soccer as it is elsewhere known – is the most popular sport in the world, something demonstrated every four years when the FIFA World Cup is held. Over 200 countries compete for a place in this month-long tournament, a process that culminates in the World Cup Final where two teams contend for the famous gold trophy. This particular match is broadcast live to over two hundred countries, with over a billion people watching the game unfold on television. It has been estimated that over 90 per cent of the world’s television-owning households tune into the final.⁷ This shows that football’s popularity is global. But what makes this particular game so popular?

When we think about it the answer is not obvious. Stripped of its razzamatazz, investment and hyped-up emotion – boiled down to its essential parts, as it were – the World Cup Final is little more than 22 men in competitive concert trying to ­advance a bright spherical object (historically, a pig’s bladder no less) across manicured grass and over a thin white line painted between two upright posts, crossed with a bar and from which hangs a net. That is it. Nothing else. So why would a billion people tune in to this event?⁸

And football is not alone. We could just as easily be talking about a whole host of different sports. Half the American people watch the annual Super Bowl, for instance, where two armour-plated teams fearlessly advance an egg-shaped ball in pursuit of a ‘touchdown’, while millions of others enjoy the ­peculiarity of NBA basketball where the trajectory of a bouncing ball is directed towards a raised, backed hoop. And there are baseball fans, golf fans, tennis fans and cricket fans. The list is almost endless. It is not just football people love. It is sport. But the question remains: why do people love it?⁹

If things were a little different – contrary to fact – this question would be much easier to answer. Imagine if everyone was tuning in to watch the best farmers plough, the best builders build or the best doctors operate. If this were the case, we could quickly conclude that these activities are vitally important to us. Agriculture provides the food which keeps us alive. Architecture provides the buildings which shelter us. And healthcare provides the remedies which rescue people from pain and disease. So of course we want to celebrate the best practitioners in these arts. If we were to think of it, the Ploughing World Cup – or some such variant – makes perfect sense. But that is not the tournament we watch. It is football that we love.¹⁰

This imaginary scenario could encourage us to draw a straight line between survival and sport. Just as farming, housing and healthcare are linked to survival, maybe sport is too? Physical prowess, for instance, could be linked to our preparation for battle, meaning – as George Orwell once put it – that modern sport is simply ‘war without the guns’, something that satisfies the displaced violence still latent in us all.¹¹ Or we might instead see things differently, sensing that sport is a fossilized residue from some ancient rituals in which our ancestors petitioned the gods, seeking their blessings in life so that they might survive amid threat and fear. To mutate Orwell, maybe sport is simply religion without the sacrifice?¹² But joining up the dots in these ways would be a mistake. Though both answers – war and religion – are nearly right, they are also very much wrong. They are in fact looking in the right place, but in the wrong sort of way. Sport has everything to do with our deepest identity, but it is an identity much more basic than the corrupted desire to survive through either violent battle or religious bartering. Sport is to do with our true nature. It is to do with who we ­really are. It is a question of our created being.

III

This book will help us understand our love for sport through an account of our most basic identity as creatures. The account offered – like any explanation – will require us to look at sport from a particular angle. This is not to say that the argument is written from the viewpoint of an Arsenal fan, though it is. It is instead to recognize that the book is written from the perspective of a Christian. This is a Christian theology of sport.

Nowadays, as so often in the past, most people do not want to look at things from a Christian perspective. They think that Christian explanations are riddled with superstitious nonsense, far-fetched myths and imaginary beings. This renders Christian explanations at best redundant and at worst dangerous in an increasingly atheistic culture that listens only to the crisp voice of objectivity intoned with demonstrable evidence and spoken in tune with scientific reasoning. This modern prejudice against Christian speech is undoubtedly unfair. Objectivity, demonstrable evidence and rationality – just like the Christian faith – are ­inescapably local. There is no view-from-nowhere, no ­tradition-less perspective. Every explanation, however much we disguise it, comes from within a community of faith. Fortunately, the modern fetish for ‘faithless’ forms of arguing has itself now fallen under suspicion, and, with its vice-like grip weakening, alternative voices can again be heard. In this changing climate (not without its own risks), Christians are again speaking with confidence. They are making their case on the faithful foundation of the good news that Jesus Christ is Lord. As a result, we will be looking at sport from a Christian perspective unashamedly, with confidence.¹³

But, in approaching the question theologically, we beat a (relatively) untrodden path. This is not to ignore the recent flurry of activity here in the UK, much of which was fuelled by the London Olympics in 2012 and a desire to make hay while the sun shines. On the whole, however, Christian theologians have not focused their minds on the question of sport. A glance through the colourful catalogues of theological publishers – as well as the index of recent works in systematic theology – quickly establishes the fact. There is next to no reference to sport.¹⁴ This gap might suggest that theologians are not that interested in sport, there being some mysterious relation between the intellectual life and sporting endeavour, with embryonic academics preferring a book in the hand over a ball at their feet. This may explain why academics are quite happy to explore all sorts of social, ­political and cultural phenomena – especially those from (self-designated) high culture – while managing to avoid the question of sport altogether.¹⁵ Alternatively, theologians may be avoiding the question of sport because thinking about it runs the risk of confusing their hobby with their work and thereby blurs the boundaries between their leisure and career. Whatever the reason(s), the simple point remains: a review of the literature finds little evidence of theological engagement with the question of sport.

Given sport’s popularity, this oversight should strike us as odd. But with its oddity noted, it is important to recognize that a good number of Christian thinkers are wrestling with issues in sport. Many authors have focused on questions surrounding faith and performance – does saying your prayers make you run faster? – or have instead tackled the ethical quandaries that spring from the clashing cultures of Christian nice-ness and the competitive spirit.¹⁶ Such works are important. But they do not constitute a theology of sport per se. Theology neat, so to speak, asks more fundamental questions, enquiring into the very nature of the object – what it is – rather than setting out on the assumption that the object is known and can be examined in relation to a second known object, in this case Christianity. Things are less certain for the theologian. Theologians attempt to give voice to reality by speaking in tune with the event of God’s own self-introduction in Jesus Christ. It is gospel-shaped speech, and it is no easy task.

The difficulty of the task must not become an excuse, however. Christian theologians must attempt to speak with God and their neighbours on the basis of the gospel. This book takes up this challenge. It is an attempt to explore the ways of God with creation in Jesus Christ, and – through the Church’s understanding of those ways – to discover what it is that makes sport so popular today.¹⁷

The argument – mercifully – is quite simple. The reader will be guided through various doctrines as we unpack the theological components of the argument step by step, spelling out the relevant implications and underscoring the value of a Christian understanding of reality for a proper appreciation of sport. This patient approach means that the reader need not have studied theology formally before. The book is instead written in a way that will allow a wide range of people – both inside and outside the Church – to understand their passion for sport in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. To that end, all the reader will need is