Football as world-view

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  to everyone, regardless of the diversity of region, nation and generation to which they belong. Only a few scattered countries, including the U.S.A., still escape this massive ascendancy - but for how long? As a proof of this popularity, one can cite the fact that the World Cup which took place in Italy in 1990 was then the most popular event ever watched since the beginning of time, with an audience of sixteen billion television viewers in all. So, what is the meaning of this craze? How is one to interpret the forms, the functions, the meanings of mass gatherings in football stadiums? For example, does the analogy, which is sometimes put forward, between sporting events and rituals, enlighten or rather get in the way of understanding these phenomena?