How would you answer, if someone ask you ‘What is football’? Will you say, ‘Football is 22 people chase after a ball, and try to get the ball at the back of the net’? If this is your answer, there are two problems in this statement. Firstly, there are 23 people chasing a ball, including the referee, but to be precise, there are usually just 21 people chasing the ball, because the goalkeepers do not ‘chase’ after the ball. However, today I am not going to teach you about football.
Sometimes, I get offended when people said to me, ‘You ONLY know about football.’ I hope you don’t see football as ‘only’ football, because there are clearly a lot of things in football and the word ‘only’ just not wide enough to include them. If a person sees football only as a ball being kicked around, obviously he doesn’t have a clue about football. If you see football as a sport, sorry, you do not know enough about football as well. Football world is like a network, and you can connect it to anything you want.
I am pretty sure people who watch football usually has a better geographic sense, and we can easily name more than five cities in England, Italy, Germany or Spain. Norwich, Birmingham, Manchester, Madrid, Bilbao, Valencia, Munich, Hamburg, Parma, Rome, etc. These are all name of football clubs which named after the city. If you watch World Cup or the Euro Cup, you can pick up a lot of countries that you haven’t heard of before. Do you know there is a small country called Honduras in Latin America? Do you know there’s a country in Africa called Algeria, Algerians’ skins are not as dark as most Africans and they are Muslims? I learnt these from football.
What else? You can learn different languages and cultural traditions from football too, because many footballers like to write words on their undershirt, and reveals the words during goal celebrations. Football fans like to write different things on their banners as well. Therefore while enjoying the beautiful game, you can also pick up some vocabularies in different languages. Fabregas once wrote ‘Felicitats Mama’ which is ‘Happy Birthday mum’ in Catalan and revealed it after he scored a goal; some Italian players will close their fingers and make a gesture like putting something into their mouth, that actually has the similar meaning to the F word in English. Football has allowed me to pick up these messages and learn more about different cultures.
Although a lot of people insist that political problems shouldn’t be brought into football, but sometimes media interpretations makes it hard for politics to separate from sports. An Italian footballer was once being criticized for his gesture that similar to Nazi Salute; not to mention there were countless racism incidents in football; and last year, when some Spanish players celebrate with Catalonia flag after the World Cup finals, the Madrid media immediately interpreted it as they support Catalonia to be independent from Spain. From that I know there are 17 autonomous communities in Spain and the government system is very complex, together with others political issues around the world.
If you take your chances to explore the football world, you will realize it is not as simple as a lot of people may think. Indeed, the whole sporting world is so complicated that, the knowledge is unlimited. So now, do you still see football as just football?
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