The Religion of Football

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 soccer games over a high school radio station, spent 20 years as a soccer parent, fondly remember the Atlanta Beat and hold Atlanta United tickets, and today probably watch too much soccer.

So, yes, I will be engrossed in the men’s World Cup, which begins on June 11 and ends on July 19, as 48 teams play 104 games over 39 days.

Football (futbol in Spanish) is the most popular sport in 155 countries and across television, streaming, and digital platforms, the global audience may surpass 5.5 billion people — two-thirds of the world’s population.

The quadrennial tournament is being hosted by the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, making the viewing schedule relatively convenient, the earliest start being noon Eastern and the latest midnight Eastern.

Eight games will be played in the Mercedes-Benz Stadium — five in the group stage, then one each in the rounds of 32 and 16, and semifinals. (FIFA, the governing body of international football, calls it the “Atlanta Stadium,” because the automaker is not an official sponsor.)

The influx of football’s faithful to Atlanta is largely thanks to Arthur Blank, who envisioned, then built a stadium that met FIFA’s requirements to host World Cup games.

The opening game, Mexico vs. South Africa, will be played in the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, one of soccer’s cathedrals. The final will be contested at MetLife Stadium, in the Meadowlands swamps of New Jersey, where National Football League teams play a game in which kicking a ball accounts for maybe 10 to 15 percent of the action.

The United States, which last hosted the men’s World Cup in 1994, qualified automatically. The U.S. opens against Paraguay, on June 12 in Los Angeles, followed by games against Australia, on June 19 in Seattle, and then Turkey, on June 25 in Los Angeles.

The top two teams from each of 12 groups and the eight best third-place teams advance from the group stage to knockout play. On paper, the U.S. should be among them, but the World Cup is notorious for surprises.

When I moderated a panel on “The Religion of Football” for the Religion News Association, the speakers 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.

Within this belief system are struggles framed as good vs. evil, notable players viewed as gods or demons, and a mythology highlighting 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, appear to bounce or sway in unison.

Their chants and songs may resemble hymns, seeking a higher power’s blessing for one team, while others, often bawdy, mock or call for damnation of an opponent.

Football has a “theology of suffering.” Seeing your team relegated to a lower division has been compared to the depths of hell, while promotion to a higher division can prompt rapturous exaltation.

Ferocious rivalries between club teams within a city or region exceed the most bitter found in American sports, but when a country’s national team plays, such as 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 particular soccer team.

This attachment offers 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 long-time followers of the game what FIFA stands for and their answer might be its well-earned reputation for greed and corruption.

For football fans around the world, attending a World Cup is akin to a religious pilgrimage, a quest that many are finding especially challenging in 2026.

Ferocious rivalries between club teams within a city or region exceed the most bitter found in American sports, but when a country’s national team plays, such as during this World Cup, there is unity, for a time.

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.'”

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.