Hallowed Be Thy Game
First shown on Channel 4 in January 2005
Karl Marx said religion is the opium of the people, and the same claim has been made about football. But is football itself becoming a religion?
Mark Dowd, a TV football commentator and lifelong Manchester United fan, investigates this question in Channel 4's documentary, Hallowed Be Thy Game. He interviews players, managers, fans and religious authorities and others in a programme packed with footage that captures the fervour the game inspires all over the world.
Divine intervention
An early scene shows one of the most dramatic turnarounds in football history. Manchester United snatched two injury time goals in the 1999 European Cup final in Barcelona’s Nou Camp stadium – 'a virtual cathedral of soccer' – to overturn a 2-1 deficit and steal victory from Bayern Munich. United chaplain Rev John Boyers, believing his team needed a miracle, confesses he prayed in the final seconds of the match: 'Well Lord, if it’s part of your intention, we really do need your intervention to win.'
Presenter Dowd was in the press box, the only hack sporting a United shirt. 'A born-again believer since the age of eight', Dowd had loaded football with quasi-religious significance. 'Was I right to pray during a football match?' he wonders. 'Were people right to refer to football as the modern day religion?'
Rituals and shrines
His film shows how the ritualisation of football not only echoes that of religion but increasingly converges with it. A Portsmouth fanatic whose home and tattooed body are shrines to his club tells Dowd: 'It’s not just a religion, it’s a way of life.' The film drops in on an Islamic wedding ceremony held at Burnley football club at the behest of an ardent supporter. Greek Orthodox priests go bananas when their team clinches victory over Portugal in a European final.
Dowd interviews Manchester City striker Robbie Fowler who, when he played for Liverpool, was dubbed ‘God’ by supporters. Fans in Argentina have taken the deification of players to its logical conclusion, and have established the Church of Diego Maradona, the country’s most celebrated footballer.
Sacred themes
'The great thing about football is that it can attract the sort of emotion and passion that becomes a sort of religion in people’s minds,' says Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson. 'Football can take on religious themes, but does that mean that football itself has become a religion?' Dowd asks Anglican Canon Edward Bailey, author of The Secular Faith Controversy. Bailey believes it has, saying that in modern society people increasingly organise their lives around football the way they once did around religion. 'If it’s habitual, it’s to do with our identity. Identity is sacred, it’s our innermost, deepest self. Isn’t that sacred?' Bailey points out that religion doesn’t necessarily have to involve God or churches. 'Buddha was absolutely clear that he was even going to ask the question whether there was a god.'
For Dowd, 'The passion for football builds on a void at the heart of our existence in a society of fragmenting communities, where more people live along than ever before….The sheer power, noise and rhythm of the crowd, I can both marvel and yet feel a deep unease. That which grips man’s soul has the potential both for enormous good, and yet can unleash tremendous tribal violence.'
There are graphic scenes of hooliganism: 'Hooligans are football’s fundamentalists,' says Dowd, adding, 'We’d never evaluate any religion on the actions of a mindless minority and nor should we do the same with the beautiful game.'
Transcendent moments
There are clips of some of football’s 'transcendent' moments of drama and skill, such as Michael Owens’ fabulous World Cup goal against Argentina. Mark Roques, author of Fields of God, says: 'In football you see an explosion of spatial possibilities and it’s there that you see what I call the glory of God … If you have a secularised world view, you don’t see it, it doesn’t have that significance.'
Roques inadvertently touches on a gap in Dowd’s thought-provoking and visually striking documentary – where is the voice of the secular football fan? He interviews Sikhs, Muslims and Christians; why didn’t he sound out a Humanist who is equally passionate about football?
A crucial fact about Dowd, which is not mentioned in the film, is that he is a Catholic who trained to be a Franciscan friar. Is he seeking from football something lacking in his own religion? Manchester United’s European success was a pivotal experience for him. 'I’d believed deep down that all of life’s ills would be cured at a stroke if only we could win back the European Cup … I felt it fading away, my own false God in tatters … I began to look for something more permanent to take from the beautiful game.' He found that in 'the powerful communion and transcendence' offered by soccer. 'If that’s a portent of what lies beyond this life,' says Dowd, 'well bring on the final whistle.'
Why football?
One could unearth plenty of other convergences between football and religion: the Catholic-Protestant hatred that taints Rangers-Celtic matches; the fact that the Co-op Burial Society now sells coffins in team’s colours. Yet is football really supplanting religion? The Maradona church notwithstanding, when fans pray for victory, it is not to some god of football. And why football? Religious parallels abound in other areas of cultural life, pop music, say: the lifestyle and principles of the 1960s ‘Love generation’; the Beatles and the Maharajah; Eric Clapton fans acclaiming their axe-hero as ‘God’; Al Green doubling as a southern preacher, the cross-currents in black devotional and secular music.
What would a 21st century Marx make of it? Regimes, dictatorships especially, including theocracies, have seized on the football's potential to divert attention from divisions dogging their society. The Brazilian team unifies the nation more efficaciously than the Catholic church. If religion as Marx perceived it, stripped of its spiritual trappings, is little more than a powerful agent of social control, he’d probably say that football functions as an effective surrogate.
