We know why taking care of your health, saving money or having a job is important. But we don’t know why football (soccer) is important. Before I continue, I should clarify that I don’t particularly like football. But maybe I didn’t like it for the same reasons that I don’t like many aspects of life, because football is like life itself. This is the perfect metaphor for it.
Mythologies
Let me explain: football, like life, raises the prospect of success, but like life, it is at least as rewarding, and often more frustrating. Like life, football has legends, deception, secrets (the offside rule), rich and poor, politicsforeigners, government and even wars, such as war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969which started after the football match between the two countries. Every match between England (where I live) and Germany or Argentina is played here as a new war between these countries, a new Normandy landing or the Falklands war, only to be concluded with a fair and expected victory that already belongs to Britain as part of their historical heritage, either it is a fraud (Maradona’s handball goal in 1986) or some other kind of bad luck. losing to Germany in 1990 and 1996).
Talking about wars, it is often said that football is relatively peaceful sublimation from the war The disproportionate value a nation holds in the collective mind translates into equally disproportionate expectations when the World Cup arrives.
How football reflects social expectations and behavior
In life, what happens outside the football stadium, we tend to do what is expected of us and more or less do it. We do not like to be contradicted or disappointed. So you can say that in our daily life we tend to win at home and lose away like in football. Like us, footballers usually do what is expected of them and don’t want to disappoint the crowd either at home or away, so they win at home and lose away. From a psychological point of view, this can be considered a form of social observance.
But the most striking parallel between football and the rest of our lives is the chaos of its expression. Unlike a Hollywood movie, the game ends at a random point, which is often disappointing from a dramatic point of view. The climax, if it happened at all, may have occurred in the third minute of the game, followed by a long stretch of neutrality. boredom. The story of life is also ugly and confusing, with long and completely forgettable periods, randomly interspersed with moments of crisis and a not so dramatic ending in a hospital bed. That’s why celebrity biographies never match the dramatic structure of biopics, no matter how hard the screenwriters try. This lack of dramatic beauty, moments of boredom, despair and bad mood, punctuated by strange and terrifying events, is the most important characteristic that football shares with life.
The role of hope in football and life
However, there is another common factor: hope, which is indestructible. Hope, according to the Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel, is the love of life and it feeds our existence and our faith that our country will win the World Cup. We all share this hope. Even me, although I don’t like football.
