Why England should keep believing in the Beautiful Game
Is it Coming Home?
Written by C.Huxley for Catholic Unscripted
England are once again through to the knockout rounds of the World Cup. Millions of Englishmen are organising their evenings around the movement of a leather ball. The pubs have filled up with merry football fans. Flags have appeared in windows, not as expressions of contemporary political strife, but as an older, more natural expression of shared celebration and loyalty.
From the perspective of Gradgrind, nobody needs football, or music or magnificent cathedrals. They are all extravagant flights of fancy that lack utility and divert attention from productivity. Yet civilisation has always produced them. To Christians this is because they express something essential about human nature and what it means to be made in the image of God.
The modern world tends to value things only according to productivity. Christian civilisation never did. In his little book Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948) the German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper observed that civilisation depends, not only upon work, but upon leisure. By leisure, he did not mean idleness or simply recovering in order to work hard again tomorrow. He meant those moments when human beings stop asking what something is for and instead delight in what is good, true and beautiful. Such moments, he believed, are not an escape from civilisation but are its very foundation.
In medieval Europe, leisure grew out of cultus - the worship of God. The Church calendar provided peasants with a rich array of feast days and celebratory seasons that enabled them to step outside the physically demanding labour that otherwise characterised daily life. Medieval games and festivities were intrinsically rooted in gratitude rather than utility. For Pieper this was no accident. Leisure flourished because it grew out of worship. Similarly, football matters today because it is one of the few activities we still pursue, not because we must, but because it is a form of celebration that acknowledges the goodness of life. In these moments, the game is enjoyed for its own sake.
This older instinct survived, oddly enough, in King James I’s Declaration of Sports (1618), which defended lawful Sunday recreations after worship against puritan hostility. Its context was politically complicated, but its instinct was built on a recognisably Catholic inheritance: Christianity had never espoused the view that humanity is made only for work and sermons. The medieval world had feast days, fairs, processions, games and holy days for good reason. Joy was not an interruption of the Christian life, but part of it.
The game we recognise today as football is essentially English. The modern rules were codified in England in 1863 and exported around the world, becoming the most popular sport globally, both at amateur and elite levels. These days, the England team struggles to translate this legacy into major trophies, yet it remains culturally important. The defeats are just as much part of that.
To date, England have exited ten major tournaments (four World Cups and six European championships) on penalties, leaving fans frustrated that they didn’t win or lose in a ‘fair fight’ within the game. Yet every tournament begins again with new hope. On the occasions when England progresses through the knockout rounds and makes it to the finals, England fans can often be heard chanting ‘football’s coming home!’ This shows that the emotions football can elicit, including faith, hope and love, are not measured only by success, but by a shared sense of belonging.
If football is not about productivity, aimless entertainment or even winning, what exactly is it doing? The answer appears to be that it is forming us. Modern culture often assumes that competition is inherently divisive and therefore to be avoided. Christianity has traditionally taken a subtler view that recognises the powerful instincts for rivalry, ambition and physical contest that humans possess. Rather than crushing these natural impulses, it considers how they should be directed.
