Football as world-view and as ritual

Abstract

What is the point of taking an interest in the apparently futile game of football? Philippe Soupault, the French Surrealist writer, in one of his prose texts, with the detachment of a traveller who has strayed into unknown territory, underlined the meaninglessness of football for whoever looks at it from a distance: Le ballon est place au centre du terrain. Un coup de sifflet, un joueur donne un coup de pied. Le match est commence... Le ballon vole, rebondit. Un joueur le suit et le poursuit, le pousse du pied, se le fait voler par un adversaire qui a son tour le conduit vers les buts ... Quand 1'occasion est bonne, il fonce et d'un grand coup de pied lance le ballon dans les buts. Alert6 le gardien se jette sur le ballon, 1'attrape et le renvoie vers un de ses equipiers. L'attaque reprend ... Avec une habilet6 et une rapidite qui ressemblent a de l'acrobatie, avec une force qui d6g6nbre en brutalite et qui se male a la ruse, les 6quipes des deux camps feintent, trompent et finissent par faire entrer le ballon entre les poteaux. L'arbitre siffle. Le resultat d6chaine 1'enthousiasme des joueurs et des partisans.It is, however, precisely the discrepancy between the futility of a game and the intensity of the passions it arouses which is at the origin of the long and exacting anthropological research done in Marseilles, Naples and Turin, and of which I would like to give a rough outline of some of the main conclusions in this article. There is no need to emphasize the infatuation of our contemporaries for this type of sporting entertainment. Indeed, in just over a century -the codification of its rules goes back to 1863 -football has become a 'planetary passion', a kind of universal referent, one of the very few if not the only element of a masculine world culture, which is obvious I I am grateful to Jean-Luc Alberti and Brian Rigby who played a crucial part in the translation of this text from French.

The Elementary Forms of Sports Fandom

“…Notes 1. Christian Bromberger (1995) -whose work highlights the parallels between sports matches and religious ceremonies-is a notable exception here, as are others' musings on sport as ''civil,'' ''secular,'' or ''natural'' religion (Alomes, 1994;Evans, 2002;Hoffman, 1992;Morris, 1981;Novak, 1994). Yet the significance and relevance of Durkheim, one of sociology's landmark theorists of religion, have not been sufficiently plumbed and applied.…”

Fans in theoretischer Perspektive

“…Unter Fußballfans sind es v.a. der persönliche Einsatz im Stadion bei der Unterstützung der Mannschaft (Bromberger 1995) sowie die langjährige Bindung an den Verein, auch in schlechten Zeiten (Giulianotti 2002: 34), die eine hohe hierarchische Stellung begründen können. Horrorfilmfans unterscheiden sich bspw.…”

The Islamic Soccer League in Israel: Setting Moral Boundaries by Taming the Wild

“…As the most popular branch of sports, soccer has been subjected to particular scrutiny on the part of European sociologists and anthropologists, who have drawn parallels between it and religious ceremonies, either in function (Coles 1975) or in form (Bromberger 1995). Bromberger, however, also qualifies his claims and points out some essential differences.…”