Bill Shankly had it right: "Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that." In truth the beautiful game is also a metaphor for and a mirror of life today.
On the field, as off, our moral compass is adrift, the temptation to win at all cost is overpowering, and mutual respect and a love of the game has given way to mercenary calculation. Players have become commodities. The obscene inflation of the transfer market echoes the world of boardroom excess and the virtual world of hedge funds, far removed from the creation of real value and "honest work".
In the dive, the professionl foul and the verbal intimidation of refereees we find expressed the ruthlessness of daily life, road rage, the disappearance of good manners, the loss of respect for the rule of law, and the loss of a sense of shared community. In soccer, Shankly also said "If you are first you are first. If you are second, you are nothing." In life too, sadly, it seems like that.
So the Vatican's endorsement of the purchase of a professional football club is understandable. "We want to bring some ethics back into the game, which has been undergoing a grave crisis in terms of sportsmanship," Edoardo Menichelli, the Archbishop of Ancona in Italy, explained after he backed a rescue of the town's notoriously wayward football team (heavily implicated in a match-fixing scandal). And, no doubt, the idea is also, from the field of play, to wave a yellow card at society to cajole a wayward citizenry not to live its life offside with the implied threat of an eternal sending-off.
Of course, He has been invoked many times on the field to support various causes. "If God had meant us to play football in the sky, he'd have put grass up there," Brian Clough once said, contemptuously dismissing the long-ball game. But the Supreme Being's favour is problematic. "Whenever the ball flew towards our goal and a score seemed inevitable, Jesus reached his foot out and cleared the ball," Brazil's Jornal Dos Sports reported of one international match. That age-old philosophical conundrum of how He could root for one side rather than another was well summed up by the sceptical Johann Cruyff. "I don't believe in God," he said. "In Spain all 22 players cross themselves. If it works the game is always going to be a tie."
In truth, He, not she, is the Great Ref in the Sky. He has given us free will, eschews personal interventions, and wants only that we should, in life as on the park, play the game fairly to the best of our God-given talents. When the final whistle blows he will have asked no more of us.