William Osula celebrates scoring Newcastle’s third goal against Ipswich during the English Premier League match at St James’ Park on April 26. — AFP
THE green of a football field is not a precise shade.
It is too vivid to be olive, too dark to be mint, too full to be emerald, too verdant to be sea. Nor is it constant. It sparkles in sunlight, glistens in rain, grows sombre under clouds.
At night, illuminated by the megawatt glare of floodlights, the colour is so rich that it almost glows.
Its effect, though, never changes, never wanes. I thought this not long ago when I found myself walking, chin buried against the wind, to St James’ Park.
That walk is one of English football’s great pilgrimages. Unlike most stadiums, St. James’ is neither hidden away on some bleak retail park on the fringes of a town nor tucked into a neighbourhood, fenced in by neat rows of red brick terraced houses.
Instead, it sits right in the heart of Newcastle, nestled in England’s northeast corner.
The stadium is elevated just a little over the city centre, enough to dominate the skyline, to serve as both a symbol and a sentinel.
On game day, as thousands of fans, all clad in Newcastle’s black-and-white jerseys, stream in its general direction, it feels as if it occupies the space where, ordinarily, a cathedral might be.
It can be easy to overlook its majesty. I had spent the day on another assignment, in the wild Northumbrian countryside, trying to piece together the mystery of who might murder a tree.
The traffic had been terrible. I was late. It was cold, and raining, because it is always raining. Besides, St. James’ Park has long been familiar. It is a place, through work, that I have been dozens of times.
Newcastle fans making their way into St James’ Park.
But once I battled my way through a thicket of fans and rushed inside, I saw the green of the field, lush and pristine, brilliant in the halogen light.
That green is too elusive to have a name. But the feeling it produces is constant.
For millions around the world, it is something approaching sacred. No matter where the field is, no matter whom it belongs to, it is anticipation and thrill and hope, but it is also familiarity, and comfort, and belonging.
That football has always presented itself as akin to religion is obvious from the language of the sport.
Faith is the metaphor of first resort: The game’s great stadiums are cathedrals, breakout stars are revelations and established ones are icons.
Its chants, no matter how profane, are songs of praise, hymns sung by a choir of worshippers. A number of widespread fan chants – “When the Saints Go Marching In,” for example – are borrowed from Christian tradition.
It has its relics – major trophies, famously, are supposed to be touched only by those who have won them – its martyrs, its saints and its sacred spaces.
Generally, only players and essential staff members are allowed in dressing rooms.
Visionary English manager Vic Buckingham once told one of his players not to walk on the field except on game day: The turf, he said, was “inviolate.” (As the story goes, his response, sincerely: “No, it’s not, it’s in green.”)
Players, managers, executives and, in particular, fans spend a considerable amount of time fretting over the state of the game’s soul, threatened as it is by rampant commercialisation and its long-standing litany of sins: diving, playacting, spitting.
Sometimes, the subtlety of allegory is abandoned and that parallel is made more explicit.
A banner at Old Trafford, the home of Manchester United Football Club, reads “MUFC The Religion.”
There is a statue outside the stadium of stars George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton, inscribed with the words “The United Trinity.”
The temptation, of course, is to dismiss this as mere pomposity, a gauge of football’s colossal self-regard. But the parallel is rooted in something concrete.
Like faith, football requires devotion: the devotion to follow a team around a country, around a continent; the devotion to wake early, thousands of miles away, to see it play; the devotion to believe that this year, everything will be different, everything will be fine.
Like religion, football asks that its adherents learn their scriptures, the myths and the legends that are passed down from one generation to the next; it offers a holistic worldview, in which all events are parsed through a specific lens of belief.
Like the religiously zealous, people subsume themselves in their fandom. Social media is awash with accounts where the bio has the name of only a team or, increasingly, an individual player.
Asked to distill the essence of their lives into a staccato sentence, a surprising proportion of the human population will come up with something like: “Husband, father, Arsenal, not necessarily in that order.”
Football, and almost football alone, has proved not only resistant but ideally suited to thrive in this hostile environment. It is, now, a sort of cultural Esperanto, a pastime and passion to be shared not just with friends but strangers in Nigeria and Malaysia and Japan.
It’s a shared language, one that can be immediately understood, instantly shared, anywhere in the world.
That’s why people seek it out. They travel around the world to chase that feeling – of belief and belonging.
It has become, for millions, the principal source of identity, a claim to membership of a community.
They brave the rain and show up, searching for the enduring wonder and comfort that come from that imprecise, ineffable shade of green. — NYT
