The Fervor of Football’s Faithful

Let’s start with this: You can call the game football — or soccer. The word “soccer” dates to the 1860s, when the British adopted “association football,” to distinguish it from rugby. “Association” was short-handed to “assoc” and then “soccer.” In the 1980s, as the game grew in the U.S., the British largely dropped “soccer,” because it sounded . . . too American. I use both terms. 

Soccer is the “other religion” in our house.

Symbols and images of this devotion decorate my office. My favorite is a framed photograph of our oldest son and me at the 2006 men’s World Cup in Germany. Hanging over a closet door is the U.S. scarf around my shoulders in that photo.

I wrote my first soccer article at age 14, called games over a high school radio station, drove for 20 years as a soccer parent, fondly remember the Atlanta Beat and hold Atlanta United tickets, and certainly watch too much soccer.

So, yes, I am engrossed in the men’s World Cup — 48 national teams playing 104 games between June 11 and July 19.

Football is the most popular sport in 155 countries (though it ranks third or fourth in the United States). The audience across television, streaming, and digital platforms may surpass 5.5 billion people — two-thirds of the world’s population.

The U.S., Mexico, and Canada qualified automatically as hosts of the quadrennial tournament. Geography makes the viewing schedule relatively convenient, the earliest game starting at noon Eastern and the latest at midnight.

Eight games are slated for the Mercedes-Benz Stadium — five in the group stage (starting with Spain vs. Cabo Verde on June 15), then one each in the rounds of 32 and 16, and semifinals. The Cup’s presence is a tribute to Arthur Blank, who conceived and built the stadium that brought Atlanta this moment. [FIFA, the governing body of international football, is calling the Benz the “Atlanta Stadium” because the automaker is not an official sponsor.]

The tournament kicked off with Mexico defeating South Africa in Mexico City’s historic Estadio Azteca. The final will be contested at MetLife Stadium, in New Jersey’s Meadowlands, where National Football League teams play a misnamed game that involves little kicking of a ball.

The top two teams from each of 12 four-team groups and the eight best third-place teams advance from the group stage to knockout play.

The U.S. opened its Group D account with an emphatic victory over Paraguay on June 12 in Los Angeles. Next up is Australia on June 19 in Seattle, then Türkiye on June 25 in Los Angeles.

“The Religion of Football” panel that I moderated at the Religion News Association conference in April included Kirk Bowman, a professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech, where he teaches a course on Soccer & Global Politics.

Based on his research in 35 countries, “I truly believe soccer is the closest thing that the secular world has to a universal religion,” Bowman wrote in a column for the Religion News Service.

In this belief system, matches are contests between good and evil, notable players are viewed as gods or demons, and the mythology highlights tales of failure and redemption.

Stadiums become houses of worship, where congregants display an extraordinary degree of passion and few atheists are found.

Their vestments are team jerseys and scarves, creating human walls of color that, for 90 minutes or more, can appear to bounce or sway in unison.

Some of their chants and songs beseech a higher power’s blessing or intervention, while others, often bawdy, mock or call for damnation of an opponent.

In football’s “theology of suffering,” your team’s relegation to a lower division feels like descending into the depths of hell, while promotion to a higher division brings forth rapturous exaltation.

The most ferocious club rivalries — such as River Plate vs. Boca Juniors, in Buenos Aires, or Galatasaray vs. Fenerbahçe, in Istanbul — exceed any animus in American sports (including the Yankees vs. Red Sox), but when the national team plays, such as Argentina or Turkey during this World Cup, there is unity, for a time.

Just as religious rituals and traditions pass from one generation to the next, in many families so does fidelity to a football team. These attachments offer a sense of community, capable of bonding together people of disparate backgrounds, if only within the stadium walls.

FIFA, in French, stands for Federation Internationale de Football Association; in English, the International Federation of Association Football.

Ask knowledgeable followers of the game what FIFA stands for and their answer might well be greed and corruption.

For the devout, attending a World Cup is akin to a pilgrimage, a quest that many are finding especially challenging in 2026.

Doug Klein, an attorney in Chicago, wrote in the Times of Israel: “To say that tickets for World Cup matches cost ‘an arm and a leg’ is to overstate the value of these sometimes useful appendages. At the end of the day, they are only appendages. The cost of World Cup tickets is more akin to ‘chest cavity and soul.'”

Then consider that the U.S government implemented what Bowman called “Kafkaesque, constantly changing, on-again-off-again impediments” on fans from several competing nations, not long after FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, presented President Donald Trump with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize.

No religion, football included, is without its version of sin.