What Football Can teach us about living.

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Algerian philosopher, Albert Camus once wrote, “All that I know surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”

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What Camus was trying to get at is that football has the power to teach us about morality because it forces us to be apart of team where no one individual can truly carry a team. Football, teaches us that we each have moral obligations in society and that we aren’t an individualistic island, we are all interconnected. Football mirrors living in a modern interconnected society.

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Football itself also mirrors life.

One of my football loving friends once told me that football is the most boring game on the planet. I couldn’t help but partly agree with him. The game when played badly and without flow, can be a boring mess that lacks direction, creative ideas, or even purpose. Very much like a life of a person who lacks direction toward a personal goal. A purposeless life is dead, boring, and lacks any vitality. Sometimes I have to admit even as a football fan, football can be like this.

Football can also be frustrating especially when attacking ideas don’t pan out despite near perfect execution. Like in life where you just have bad luck even when you try your best, we see it in every football season where sometimes the team that just has one opportunity take it and wins the game, while the other team, which did virtually everything right in the attacking sense falls short. You do make your own luck in football but also you can be very unlucky when it just isn’t your team’s day. The same can said in everyday life.

Football however; can also be beautiful. People call it the beautiful game for a reason. The game can bring about miracles of serendipity, where hard work meets opportunity at the right time. Like life, things can fall in to place if you keep working hard and seeking out opportunities, the same can be said in football where it is often the attacking team, the team taking the higher ground, that produces beautiful moments of serendipity at an opportune time, in the form of scoring a beautiful goal. It is these moments we strife for and what footballers strive for on the biggest stage. These moments are the most inspirational moments in the game and part of the reason why we love football so much.

Football is like life in others ways. If you watch the game carefully, there are periods where there is nothing happening and it is almost at the moment when something is about to happen. Like life, football happens in real time where change happens gradually then suddenly as the game transitions effortlessly from different paces of play much like how we transition from day to day from being busy to doing nothing then back again. This can also be applicable to trends in culture and technology.

Football mimics how we go about life as things build then break then build back again, gradually then suddenly. Ultimately in both situations patience is needed as we navigate the ever changing situations and circumstances.

Lastly and most importantly, football reminds us what it is like to be human. Football is a game that is full of contradictions and our job as fans of the game is to work through those contradictions to reach a higher form of truth whether that is debating what a handball really is or coming to terms with the fact that on the day the better team lost. You see this all the time on football talk shows. Football is a game that constantly challenges our assumptions about our world and forces us to question what we really value and hold true to ourselves.

Football is human in the sense that it is a game that brings out the full range of human emotions when playing and watching it. These emotions are displayed in the tears of players when they learn they are relegated to the explosion of ecstasy after scoring an important goal to mad anxiety when your team is down at home in a cup match with only minutes left or to the utter doldrums of boredom and disinterest that sometimes occur during a football match.

Yes, other sports involve ranges of emotions too but not like football where over the course of a match your emotions ebb and flow like that of watching theatre. Football like theatre has tragedy and comedy and reminds us what is truly like to be a human being in a world that tells us to put away our emotions to the side as we walk through our daily lives often searching for meaning.

So to conclude, next time you watch a football match, remember why you love this game so much. It might just be the one of the most human things you can do.