How Ottonian Germany Proves That Football is Not a Religion

James Hamilton examines the oft-repeated comparison between football fandom and religion…

England’s football stadia were the last major addition to our great Victorian cities in their original form: it follows from that that, like so much about our great Victorian cities, by the 1970s they were clapped out and unfit for purpose. In truth, attendances had been falling for a lot longer than that – football was losing audience share to cinema, speedway and greyhound racing from the 1920s, and the post War boom gave only the briefest and most misleading of respites. In 1978, only 25m people passed through English football turnstiles; by 1988, it was down to 19m.  

In the 1970s and 1980s, “we had real football” and “the game was closer to the fans”, and the loss of such crucial factors provides an explanation for why, last year, 31 million people went to football, a figure not attained since before the Munich Disaster. 

Sarcasm aside, one big reason for the turnaround has been the refurbishment and replacement of so many of our football grounds. The general standard of England’s stadia is now higher than anywhere else in the world and a World Cup could be staged here with minimal preparation (and given Brazil’s current travails in getting ready for 2014, don’t rule it out). 

It was always said that football stadia were working class cathedrals. Well, the cathedrals are decked with memorials, now, too, just like the medieval ones,and most of them of recent vintage. The Munich Clock at Old Trafford was an early pioneer, but in Premier League days there’s been a rush to build statues, name gates and stands, and unveil plaques. There’d be something Poets’ Corner about all this if it weren’t so Warsaw Pact. 

And that’s the thing about these familiar football clichés: they share with those plaques and statues a hint of the gimcrack, the ersatz, and more perhaps than the game deserves. The (roofless, spireless) cathedrals host “worship” in the form of a singing throng, but the throng’s worshipping two separate gods, and takes time off to hurl abuse at the priests and each other. Aside from turning up, there’s not a lot you have to do in this religion and it won’t help you in time of trouble (indeed, it might be the cause of quite awful tragedy, as at Hillsbrough in 1989, which is still unresolved business in every respect). And anyway, I thought it was supposed to be the working man’s ballet? 

Working man’s ballet; working man’s cathedral – they’re patronizing misapprehensions, really, and it was a patronizing misapprehension of my own, years ago, that gave the clue to what was really going on in football grounds. When I went up to university, I was a practicing Christian myself (the lack of life-guidance is just the first reason football isn’t a religion in that sense, because it fails to answer the question what do you do differently, because of what you believe?) and I had a clear, nay fixed, idea of what that meant. 

Magdalen was the college of Bruce MacFarlane and Karl Leyser, or had been: they were the heroes and mentors of the men who taught me (and they were all men then). Leyser had used insights from anthropology to throw light onto the religious world of Ottonian Germany (the 900s, in other words). In Ottonian society, violence was the key to everything: you made your fortune by kidnapping and ransomming wealthy heiresses, you gathered followers via your ability to capture and command loot, religious relics had real power in battle and the more of those you could corral the better. All the while, religious practice was for professionals – monks and nuns – so your men protected monasteries, and in turn they prayed and lived a holy life on your behalf. 

For me at age 19, all of this was inexplicable: Leyser was throwing sand, not light, onto the problem, and, like so many agnostics and atheists, he’d misunderstood Christianity and applied “reductionist” thinking to it. (“Reductionism” as a term never seems to be used by anyone who knows what it actually means, and I’ve been as guilty of that as anyone). 

I’d been warned that the dreaming spires could be bad for your faith, and I’d been given a reading list in four languages which it piqued my vanity to conquer. At the same time, I ran across the writings of Don Cupitt: by the time I was finished, I had lost my faith and, more importantly, begun to understand the depth of what Leyser had achieved.  

But it was many years before I realized how well his analysis of religion under Otto I fit modern football. What’s going on in the stadia isn’t worship: it’s expression of allegiance to a successful warrior band and their leader. The more money you have, and the more success, the more you draw both fighters and followers to you (Arsene Wenger, in July 2011, is currently experiencing the downside to all this). The “saints” from football’s past – the Busbys, the Shanklys – become foci for an idea of football whilst the dirty work of actually paying players and winning games goes on. The club museum fills with their relics: the statues and plaques are the shields and swords of your glorious dead.  

No such analogy would ever be a complete fit for what is, after all, a modern phenomenon. What’s going on at the football is really just an instinctively-forming shadow of what was once automatic behaviour. And fans go home on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday to ordinary, worthwhile and sensible lives with work and family. I’d hate my parallel with Ottonian Germany to patronize, and I only wish I thought the coiners of football-as-religion, stadium-as-cathedral, working-man’s-ballet had felt the same.

James Hamilton blogs at More Than Mind Games.
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12 thoughts on “How Ottonian Germany Proves That Football is Not a Religion

  1. Gaw
    July 20, 2011 at 17:29

    Thought-provoking stuff.

    Perhaps football isn’t essentially a modern form of anything that had gone before? Rather, it combines various things that people have always and everywhere found satisfying – athletic performance, hero worship, competition, belonging, ritual, chanting, drinking, violence, and so on – but in a new way that could only have come about in the modern industrial city.

    It’s interesting to ponder why the balance of all these enjoyable elements differs from sport to sport.

    • jameshamilton1968@googlemail.com'
      James Hamilton
      July 20, 2011 at 22:35

      Gaw, FWIW, my feeling at the moment is that football is a new-in-the-late-nineteenth-century phenomenon that is completely of itself. In other words, my best guess is that it isn’t like anything else, but it does demonstratively *attract* comparisons with other, older phenomena. Right from the beginning, there’s been a drive amongst commentators on the game to make those comparisons in order to attempt an understanding – but also, I think, to attempt a belittling.

      So I’d certainly agree that it’s not a modern version of an older phenomenon. And, although this is another discussion, I’m not sure it’s a sport to line up alongside athletics or tennis either, at least not in the UK.

      It’s something that spread faster and further in its first 30 years than almost anything before or since: only on the Indian subcontinent is it NOT the subject of intense public and media interest, possessed of financial clout, accused of corruption etc.

      My hunch is, that to understand why that is, it’s necessary to forget football-as-sport or football-as-stupid-thing-lowbrows-enjoy and look elsewhere, but where I’m not entirely sure. It’s too much of a stretch, for instance, to claim that it calls upon anything as fundamental or instinctive as music.

      Perhaps a better way of looking at it is to consider it as just another of a string of novelties in the West that appeared between 1860-1910 (telephone, typewriter, linotype, sound recording, film photography, internal combustion engine, flight, radio) that all expanded far and fast together and accustomed people to new arrivals of that kind.

      • Gaw
        July 21, 2011 at 07:17

        Have you come across this book on French rugby, James?

        http://www.amazon.fr/French-Rugby-Football-Cultural-History/dp/1859733220/

        It’s infected a bit by academic jargon but it has some terrific insights into the place of a sport in a modernising culture (or, more properly, cultures: the division between Paris and the Midi is a theme). I imagine there are similar books on football but this is the only one I’ve come across on ovalisme.

        • jameshamilton1968@googlemail.com'
          James Hamilton
          July 21, 2011 at 08:05

          No, I haven’t Gaw – thanks!

  2. wormstir@gmail.com'
    July 20, 2011 at 20:34

    makes sense to me, and I enjoy reading about football as its not something I know anything about, so thankyou James for the sporty insights – my sporting knowledge only stretches to foxy boxing

  3. andrewnixon@blueyonder.co.uk'
    July 20, 2011 at 20:44

    What Gaw said.

    Re ritual and belonging, it’s interesting that the tribe exerts such a powerful pull not just in local stadia but through the telly. Most obsessive Man U or Liverpool fans, wholly identifying themselves with the club, have never been near Manchester or Liverpool.

    • johngjobling@googlemail.com'
      malty
      July 20, 2011 at 22:20

      That may explain the fortnightly flights that used to leave (they may well still do) Reykjavik, destination Manchester, the occupants all wearing Man U tops.
      It could be argued, I suppose that Icelanders ain’t got much except cod, ice, discos and Dalvik United.

      And stunning blonde Sigmundsdottirs.

    • jameshamilton1968@googlemail.com'
      James Hamilton
      July 20, 2011 at 22:38

      With the BBC’s move to Salford, Brit, all that changes. (Although they were careful that the former northern slum area they’ve chosen was a rugby-playing former northern slum area!)

  4. john.hh43@googlemail.com'
    john halliwell
    July 21, 2011 at 11:03

    James, it is a thought-provoking post, made even more interesting by your response to Gaw’s comment. Perhaps if Bill Shankly were still alive and an avid Dabbler he would provide us with an explanation for his 1981 remark that ‘football is much more important than life and death’. Was it said tongue-in-cheek, a piece of Shankly hyperbole made simply to capture the central position held by football in the lives of so many people, an overwhelming instinct to belong, and be accepted unquestioningly as a member of a distinct tribe?

    I hope lots of German football fans read The Dabbler and are now anticipating Euro 2012 and the inevitable meeting with the old enemy, and making plans to counter England fans monotonous impression of 2000 spitfires with a chant of “Orrrtto, Orrrtto, Good King Orrrtto”. The spitfires would return to base immediately leaving their pilots scatching their heads and asking “Who’s bleedin’ Otto?”

  5. wormstir@gmail.com'
    July 21, 2011 at 11:19

    …what would an Otto football mascot look like?

  6. jameshamilton1968@googlemail.com'
    James Hamilton
    July 21, 2011 at 13:17

    “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

    You’re right, John. No other way to read it, really. Pity many commentators miss out the second line, because, without taking away from the passion in what he’s saying, its damned funny.

    Worm: it would look like a very small, very angry pony! One website has Otto I amongst the “ten most evil people of the 10th century” which is doing well: I can’t name ten people at all from back then, and I spent 8 weeks of my life on the period.

  7. Naccari@faith.org'
    July 21, 2011 at 20:08

    I’m pretty sure I was born in the wrong decade but stuff like this makes it bearable.

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