An Extract from the Yarn...The Great Game by Ed Smith

It’s a cliché to say that football is the new religion. Perhaps better to say that sport is now our principal ceremony – which is close but not quite the same thing.

One of the things I love most about watching live sport is arriving on foot. Then it all makes sense again. Being lost in a crowd of strangers, a swell of anticipation, the casual gossip and predictions. Our colours, their colours.

It’s one of the ways sport reconnects us with the things we often miss in daily life (especially as our lives are diminished by digital technologies): a tangible sense of identity and expectation, everyone in the same place at the same time for the same reason. 

When I used to commentate on sport for the BBC, whenever possible I tried to walk to stadium before the start of play. Partly, there was a small professional dimension – I liked picking up on random snippets of opinion and mischief. More fundamentally, walking to the ground got me in step with the rituals the match. Arriving anonymously within a crowd connects you with the deeper rhythms of the occasion.

Because without its rituals – the shared journey, the tribal clothes, the march of the crowd  – sport loses texture and depth. Covid taught us many things, among them that sport is not, and never can be, a made-for-television game-show. Played by people, watched by people – sport is human to its core. Television is brilliant at many things, but even today’s tech wizards can take mimicry only so far.

Parents might weep at football clubs constantly updating their official strips and the high cost of replacing them. But the club shirt isn’t just another corporate add on, it’s bound up with sport’s fundamental appeal – belonging to something beyond any single individual.

There’s nothing new here, of course, which is part of the point. On a broiling hot afternoon this summer in Ferrara, I found myself sheltering from the sun in an ancient courtyard reading about the city’s famous annual palio, the spectacular annual horse race contested by Ferrara’s eight distinct neighbourhoods (or contrade).

The palio dates back to the thirteenth century, a blur of chivralric pageantry, sporting daring and civic pride. It is both a medieval re-enactment and a reminder: people love to show how deeply they belong, both inside the arena and watching from the sidelines, and sport provides the perfect excuse.

No wonder the pioneers of modern sport borrowed heavily from the iconography and the language of chivalry, repurposing the concepts of ‘tournaments’ and ‘shields’ within football and cricket. You earned your ‘colours’ – a tradition that materialised into ‘owning your shirt’ at Harvard in 1865, when the best players on the team were allowed to keep their playing kit with the ‘H’ embroidered on the front of the flannel shirt. The letterman jersey was born.

Modern sport taps into traditions so ancient that we take them for granted. The genius of the sports industry has been its ability to draw on and interweave many different traditions, never pausing at the contradictions – it is progressive and yet traditional, unsentimental but nostalgic, always changing while being reassuringly constant. Those human threads and tensions are on show every weekend, in every town across the country.

Sport has a rough edge and people who don’t like the mass spectacle put up with a lot to accommodate us – massive disruption and expense, special trains, diverted public services, crowded tubes, traffic stopped still.

But all the effort and resources aren’t really about the sport, or only up to a point. The underlying purpose is providing a forum for human ceremony and story-telling (two concepts that are rarely found far apart).

The sports match provides the context, but the search is universal – a moment that lifts us beyond our everyday worries, a story we’ll never forget, experienced from the double perspective of an individual and as a member of a crowd. And in seeking to find meaning in sport, we accidentally contribute to it – a metaphor of sorts, and one that a civilised worldview never forgets.

Ed Smith is the director of the Institute of Sports Humanities and author of Making Decisions