"Football is more important than life or death": A plea to all non believers

For believers in the religion called football, Bill Shankly's words will ring true for eternity. "Football isn't a matter of life or death, it's much more important than that."

I know what most of you reading this blog are thinking… You have either stumbled across it or were redirected from a football site or a fellow football supporter? You have football on the brain, day in day out. You can’t wait to find out which mega superstar or which donkey is linked with YOUR club next. You go to every game, chant every chant, know everything there is to know about your team. Am I right?

However, I do not write this piece for you fellow supporters. I write this for the people who don’t ‘get’ why in the hell we stay up to 4am to see some pre season friendly against the Uzbekistan fourth XI. For the people who don’t understand why we cream our pants every time Messi nutmegs an opponent or Ronaldo dicks a free kick in from 67 yards. Why 4-4-2 is better than 4-3-3. The people who don’t understand. Well my friends, this is for you.

You see for me, and probably the person who shows you this blog, football is like a religion. Bill Shankly, the then Liverpool FC manager once wrote “Football is not about life or death, it is more important than that.” To every football fan Shankly was telling the truth.

Non believers, can I ask you a question? How crushed has your other half, or friend been when the team they support has lost, what you consider to be, only a game? Have they been even more upset when you have told them “Its only a game”? Football means more than that to its believers.

Ask any member of an organised religion, why do they believe in their deity? More often than not it will come back to something they call faith. It is not something you can touch or explain, you just have faith. Even if science can prove this belief is fundamentally wrong, religious people still have faith. They believe in an afterlife, or that one day Armageddon will strike and all non believers will be burnt in hell for eternity… Anyway, back to the topic. Ask any long suffering football supporter, who hasn’t seen a home win in 15 games, why in the blazes do they still turn up each week? More often than not they will say they have faith that some miracle will happen this time. Sound familiar?

Take organised religion’s place of worship. The churches, mosques, synagogues all over this planet we call Earth, everyday people pray and give thanks to their respected God/Goddess/Gods. They feel certain reverence while attending such places. It makes them feel good. How exactly then, dear non believers, are they different to football supporters going to their teams grounds? Everyday many thousands of supporters all over the world turn up to their respected ‘church’ to support a bunch of people, who they have blind faith in and take a lot of pleasure doing so.

The very few who dedicate their entire careers to one club, who bleed the club colours, who score important winning goals in cup finals etc. These are the people who go down as saints for their respective clubs. They have hymns sung about them forever, they go down in folklore as being super human for generations to come. They are seen as idols by both the young and old.

Do you see my point,dear non believer? All the chants about famous players that ring around every ground in the world, these are our hymns. The peoples names being sung are our saints, and can also become our fallen angels when they move to rival teams. We turn up to our churches every weekend, to praise our saints with our adoration and our hymns and we get a lot of pleasure out of it. All in the name of blind faith. Try it if you don’t believe me. You might just become a believer.