There’s a famous old saying that football is ‘more than just a game’ and it couldn’t be more right. Football brings people together under one banner, football connects millions of people around the world, football is a global language; to some people, football is life.
With the Premiership season ending last weekend, millions of people paid tribute to the retiring Manchester United manager of 26 years, Sir Alex Ferguson, and they weren’t all football fans. It doesn’t take someone with much football know-how to realise that Fergie had achieved fantastic things with United – 13 league titles sounds like a lot to anyone but when you add in the 25 other trophies he gathered in his time at United you start to paint the picture of someone who was more than a man to many, he was a symbol of the game. You could go practically anywhere in the world and find someone who knows he is and you wouldn’t even have to speak their language to communicate about him. That is the power of football.
It isn’t just global icons this applies to, I wasn’t even alive when my team (Southampton) won their one and only FA Cup in 1976, yet I knew who cup-winning captain Peter Rodrigues was when I saw him and so did many people younger than me who were clambering for his autograph. He had become a local legend, the one person in the history of English football who can say he lifted the FA Cup at Wembley for Southampton. Football gifted this man a place in its history and in the city of Southampton’s.
Players may make history but it’s the fans who help create it – if David Beckham had scored his iconic free kick against Greece to send England to the 2002 World Cup in an empty stadium how would he have celebrated? I can’t see him running towards an empty stand to punch the air. There’s nothing better than witnessing a sea of 70,000 people go crazy for one moment of skill, technical ability and genius. This was just the start of the world cup journey for the fans, come the summer there were flags of St. George flying everywhere from flat windows to car aerials, the fans of the English national team embraced the excitement.
Allow me to take off my rose-tinted glasses for a moment. I understand that the sport can bring up it’s fair share of tragedies – ordinary people went to Hillsborough and Heysel and never returned home. Ordinary mums said goodbye to their children and husbands for the last time. Ordinary people went to watch a football match and paid with their lives. Ordinary people made huge mistakes. With that being said, ordinary people came together to perform extraordinary feats of bravery to save the lives of so many others, ordinary people emerged from the darkest moments of their lives to fight for justice for the 96, ordinary people became symbolic. Ordinary people gave hope a face.
Football creates conversations, it forges friendships, it ignites passion. I think what I’m really trying to say here is simple: football creates heroes.