How I Fell In Love With Football (Again)

The story of a game's rise, and fall, and rise

Association Football is far and away the world’s most popular sport. Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay … and there are a lot of reasons to hate it: the players, the fans, and FIFA itself are all reasonable targets for contempt. 

A typical ninety minutes of the ‘beautiful game’ is replete with players diving, abusing the referee, and putting on the most unbelievably unsporting theatrics. If you’re lucky, you might see headbutting, kung-fu, kicking, and biting. A fan of any self-respecting sport would likely come away thinking that footballers are the least honourable athletes on the planet. Indeed, footballers are notorious cheaters, abusers, and bullies on and off the pitch, with many famous footballers having been accused of truly heinous crimes, only to have their contracts renewed. 

It should come as no surprise, then, that their respective clubs and the sport’s regulatory body are hardly saints either. Half the clubs nowadays are owned by dodgy conglomerates or reputation-laundering dictatorships with horrific human rights records. And this sportswashing rot goes right to the top. Qatar – a nation known more for its reliance on slave labour than its strong footballing tradition – bribed its way to hosting the 2022 World Cup, before FIFA somehow managed to find an even worse candidate to host the 2034 edition: Saudi Arabia. FIFA President Gianni Infantino was even kind enough to give its inaugural FIFA Peace Prize to everyone’s least favourite US President, crybaby, and soon-to-be Overlord of Venezuela and Greenland, Donald Trump. 

Curiously, what I find puts people off football the most is football fans. They’re perceived as brutish hooligans whose views on race, gender and politics are, to put it mildly, at odds with progressive norms. And this perception isn’t far off. It’s not entirely uncommon to see Nazi salutes at SS Lazio games (emphasis on the SS) or banners with anti-arab slogans at Beitar Jerusalem matches, and fans of English clubs Chelsea and Millwall are just generally known for being far-right xenophobes. 

From this excoriating description, dear reader, you might assume I don’t particularly like football. Well, you’d be wrong … mostly. My love of the game was first kindled watching Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, whose still-unparalleled footballing ability was, then, not overshadowed by sordid off-the-pitch controversies. This love was further cemented by appreciating FC Barcelona’s resistance against Spanish fascism, by chanting for Catalan independence with thousands of fans at the Camp Nou, and admittedly, by giving into the tribalism that is recognising arch-rivals Real Madrid represented everything Barcelona was not: arrogant super-star players, Francoism, and suitably chauvinistic fans. However, numerous scandals, including Messi’s botched departure, eroded Barcelona’s sheen, and, for a long time, I felt I had fallen out of love. I still wanted Barcelona to win but no longer actively followed the sport. 

That all changed recently. Before moving to Scotland, I was already fond of Celtic Football Club. Sure, the club didn’t have Barcelona's sheer talent, but they had a similar ethos. Founded by Irish Catholics in Glasgow, not long after the genocidal famine Britain engineered in Ireland, the club and its fans are committed anti-colonialists. Every Celtic match, without fail, features Palestinian, Irish and Basque flags. Their arch-rivals, Rangers, represent everything Celtic are not: Protestant ascendancy, loyalist unionism, and monarchy. Its fans fly Israeli flags and Union Jacks, and the club long followed an unwritten policy barring Catholic players. What really did it for me, however, was going to matches. In all the games we’ve been to at Celtic Park, affectionately called “Paradise” by fans, my partner and I have encountered nothing but warmth and joviality. We’ve met fellow Irish-speakers, families with their kids, a cohort of old pensioners – one of whom spent an entire match offering us sweets and club trivia – and passionate if slightly obnoxious hecklers. We’ve sung Fields of Athenry with hundreds of compatriots and celebrated incredible goals. To make things better, Celtic players work their arses off, scarcely complain, and get right up after falling down. 

Football’s not for everyone, but it’s not inherently exclusionary. For every Ronaldo, there’s a Messi; for every Rangers, there's a Celtic; and for every far-right racist, there’s a nice old lady handing out sweets. 

Come rain or shine, victory or defeat, whatever the roll of the dice, there’s no place I’d rather be than Paradise.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons