(This post was first published by The Dabbler in July 2011)
England’s football stadia were the last major addition to our great Victorian cities in their original form: it follows from that that, like so much about our great Victorian cities, by the 1970s they were clapped out and unfit for purpose. In truth, attendances had been falling for a lot longer than that – football was losing audience share to cinema, speedway and greyhound racing from the 1920s, and the post War boom gave only the briefest and most misleading of respites. In 1978, only 25m people passed through English football turnstiles; by 1988, it was down to 19m.
In the 1970s and 1980s, “we had real football” and “the game was closer to the fans”, and the loss of such crucial factors provides an explanation for why, last year, 31 million people went to football, a figure not attained since before the Munich Disaster.
Sarcasm aside, one big reason for the turnaround has been the refurbishment and replacement of so many of our football grounds. The general standard of England’s stadia is now higher than anywhere else in the world and a World Cup could be staged here with minimal preparation (and given Brazil’s current travails in getting ready for 2014, don’t rule it out).
It was always said that football stadia were working class cathedrals. Well, the cathedrals are decked with memorials, now, too, just like the medieval ones,and most of them of recent vintage. The Munich Clock at Old Trafford was an early pioneer, but in Premier League days there’s been a rush to build statues, name gates and stands, and unveil plaques. There’d be something Poets’ Corner about all this if it weren’t so Warsaw Pact.
And that’s the thing about these familiar football clichés: they share with those plaques and statues a hint of the gimcrack, the ersatz, and more perhaps than the game deserves. The (roofless, spireless) cathedrals host “worship” in the form of a singing throng, but the throng’s worshipping two separate gods, and takes time off to hurl abuse at the priests and each other. Aside from turning up, there’s not a lot you have to do in this religion and it won’t help you in time of trouble (indeed, it might be the cause of quite awful tragedy, as at Hillsbrough in 1989, which is still unresolved business in every respect). And anyway, I thought it was supposed to be the working man’s ballet?
Working man’s ballet; working man’s cathedral – they’re patronizing misapprehensions, really, and it was a patronizing misapprehension of my own, years ago, that gave the clue to what was really going on in football grounds. When I went up to university, I was a practicing Christian myself (the lack of life-guidance is just the first reason football isn’t a religion in that sense, because it fails to answer the question what do you do differently, because of what you believe?) and I had a clear, nay fixed, idea of what that meant.
Magdalen was the college of Bruce MacFarlane and Karl Leyser, or had been: they were the heroes and mentors of the men who taught me (and they were all men then). Leyser had used insights from anthropology to throw light onto the religious world of Ottonian Germany (the 900s, in other words). In Ottonian society, violence was the key to everything: you made your fortune by kidnapping and ransomming wealthy heiresses, you gathered followers via your ability to capture and command loot, religious relics had real power in battle and the more of those you could corral the better. All the while, religious practice was for professionals – monks and nuns – so your men protected monasteries, and in turn they prayed and lived a holy life on your behalf.
For me at age 19, all of this was inexplicable: Leyser was throwing sand, not light, onto the problem, and, like so many agnostics and atheists, he’d misunderstood Christianity and applied “reductionist” thinking to it. (“Reductionism” as a term never seems to be used by anyone who knows what it actually means, and I’ve been as guilty of that as anyone).
I’d been warned that the dreaming spires could be bad for your faith, and I’d been given a reading list in four languages which it piqued my vanity to conquer. At the same time, I ran across the writings of Don Cupitt: by the time I was finished, I had lost my faith and, more importantly, begun to understand the depth of what Leyser had achieved.
But it was many years before I realized how well his analysis of religion under Otto I fit modern football. What’s going on in the stadia isn’t worship: it’s expression of allegiance to a successful warrior band and their leader. The more money you have, and the more success, the more you draw both fighters and followers to you (Arsene Wenger, in July 2011, is currently experiencing the downside to all this). The “saints” from football’s past – the Busbys, the Shanklys – become foci for an idea of football whilst the dirty work of actually paying players and winning games goes on. The club museum fills with their relics: the statues and plaques are the shields and swords of your glorious dead.
No such analogy would ever be a complete fit for what is, after all, a modern phenomenon. What’s going on at the football is really just an instinctively-forming shadow of what was once automatic behaviour. And fans go home on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday to ordinary, worthwhile and sensible lives with work and family. I’d hate my parallel with Ottonian Germany to patronize, and I only wish I thought the coiners of football-as-religion, stadium-as-cathedral, working-man’s-ballet had felt the same.