“Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.” The great Bill Shankly’s famous quote on what Pele dubbed ‘the beautiful game’. Whilst Shankly’s take was purely hyperbolic, or at least in the wider context it’s gone down in history as so, Bill Shankly, like so many was a football addict and somewhere deep down, he probably meant what he said.
Be it the dugouts, the pitch, or wider society, eleven men kicking a ball around has captured the hearts and minds of millions over the past 150 years or so.
Following on from official rules being put to print in the late 19th century, the Corinthian spirit of the amateur game was traded for the professional game that endures to this day.
Vast, open concrete terraces were the gathering points for working men in their cloth caps every Saturday at 3 o’clock to escape the hardships of the ship yards, the mines and the harsh unforgiving environment of dangerous, industrial work. Football wasn’t and still isn’t just a game. It became, and still is, the meeting place for the proletariat to unify and forget the stresses of every day life for 90 minutes.
Even during both world wars the emotional pull of football couldn’t be put to one side. On Christmas Day 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force overheard their German adversaries singing carols and shouting messages of festive good will across the pitch black of No Man’s Land. A ball was kicked over, it was kicked back and then in the middle of what had been a killing field dyed red with the blood of young men barely old enough to shave, a game of football ensued.
How the game and the peace concluded is shrouded in mythology. Something took place that caused panic. Possibly a shot or a flair, then the men rapidly retreated back to the crippling anxiety of trench warfare and picked up their hostilities where they had left them. But, for a brief moment in time, football had been used as an extension of mutual respect and friendship in the most unlikely of places.
Between 1939 and 1945, nothing in Europe was safe from the threat of being crushed under a Nazi jackboot as the most evil regime since time began goose-stepped, murdered and looted their way across the continent. The last World Cup prior to the conflict was won by Italy in 1938.
The Nazis had an insatiable lust for art and cultural artifacts, the Jules Rimet trophy was high on their list. The trophy had been housed in a Rome bank, but sensing the danger, Italian Football Federation president Ottorino Barassi had it removed and kept it concealed in a shoe box under his bed for the duration of the war. Even with the fate of the free world hanging by a thread, Barassi’s actions, despite the gravity of the situation and the dangers posed to him personally if caught, showed football was still important. Football was worth the risk to his life.
Football is such a driver for people, such an obsession, such a deep love that it’s often used to help them through a personal crisis. In 1994, Louis Van Gaal’s wife Fernanda passed away following a battle with cancer. All the Ajax players and their wives were close and had attended many social functions together which included the boss and his wife. They knew how deep this loss was and they also knew this meant he would need to spend time away from the game. However, they were in for a shock the very next day when they saw Van Gaal’s car heading through the gates of the training ground. It was back to business. Van Gaal said football got him through the most difficult period in his life.
Even romantic relationships are infiltrated by the beautiful game. Many an other half has just had to accept that football is the one immovable object from their partners life. No event, can get in the way of going to or watching the match. I left my own wedding to watch the Champions League Final. I once heard my father say to my mother on a family holiday after a football stadium tour: “Christ, you’ve seen two European Cups today what more could you want?”.
Football makes you good at geography when you’ve never looked at a map. Football allows you to hug and kiss complete strangers in a mutual outburst of total emotional imbalance. Football allows the rational thinker to cross into bias, delusion and irrationality. Football makes the words your boss says at work flow in one ear then head straight out the other because what your mind is really set on is the Romanian left-back that’s rumoured to be signing this week. Football ensures your ten-year-old self remains alive within you forever.
Perhaps if we can’t and shouldn’t take Bill Shankly’s advice literally then we should take on board Ernst Happel’s: “A day without football is a day lost”. Now who could argue with that?
By Calum Maltman – @BlogEFI
Photograph: Embeddable Images – Getty Images: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/photos/bill-shankly?assettype=image&family=editorial&phrase=bill%20shankly&sort=best&embeddable=true
