Sebas van Aert is a journalist and podcaster. He studied philosophy and played in NAC Breda’s youth football team. For the Third Floor, he wrote the article below.
As soon as the whistle blows and the ball starts to move, the noise of the outside world fades away. Thoughts sink into the background, your head grows quiet. All you hear are the voices of your team-mates and the sound of the ball passing swiftly from foot to foot. For the next 90 minutes, it takes up all your attention. You have one purpose: to get the ball into the net.
Over a million Dutch people enjoy this almost meditative experience every week. Young, old, rich, poor, man, woman, non-binary, black or white – they all get together at the weekend to kick that ball around. What makes football so accessible as a sport is its simplicity: the team of 11 players that scores the most goals after two lots of 45 minutes is the winner. The game hinges around the ball. ‘Because you can’t score without the ball’, as Dutch football legend Johan Cruyff once wisely noted.
The birth of football
Football isn’t just the most popular sport in the world, it’s one of humanity’s oldest too. Elements of modern football date back centuries. The Maya people were already playing a game three thousand years ago, the aim of which was to use your hip to get the ball through a hole on the side. It was made of rubber and weighed around seven kilos, which regularly left players nursing severe bruises.
The oldest precursor of contemporary football is Tsu Chu, which dates back to the 3rd century bce. It formed part of the military training followed by Chinese soldiers in the Han dynasty and has been officially recognized by FIFA as the first form of football. The two teams could score by getting a leather ball, filled with feathers and animal hair, through a five-metre-high hole. Use of the hands was not permitted.
Another, more recent form of football was played in the streets of England in the Middle Ages. Two rival villages or districts took each other on, with the aim of getting the heavy ball into the opponent’s goal in the course of what amounted to a mass brawl. Teams could run to over a hundred people. The playing field took the form of village streets and the surrounding land, with up to three kilometres between the two goals. There were hardly any rules, and so the ‘matches’ regularly degenerated into violence, with local shopkeepers left to count the cost.
This version of the sport, sometimes referred to as ‘folk football’, is still played in several English villages and towns today. The most famous national event is the Shrovetide match, played each year in the English village of Ashbourne. Although this thuggish-looking village event has more in common with rugby than football, it was the source from which contemporary football originated.
Different rules applied to folk football in different parts of England. In some places you were allowed to use your hands, in others it was prohibited. A group of students at Cambridge University decided to remedy this by drawing up a set of standard rules. One of their stipulations was that you weren’t allowed to touch the ball with your hand.
The new, standard rules were confirmed in 1863 when the Football Association (FA), the first of its kind in the world, was founded. This marked the birth of modern football, which the rules clearly distinguished from rugby. Football then spread from England to the rest of the world.
The utility of football
Since then, football has given people a great deal. On an individual level, the sport is good for your physical and mental health, and the game reduces the risk of certain chronic diseases. Watching and playing it is a hobby too and a source of entertainment. For some people, it can be a refuge, a place where you don’t have to think about your everyday problems for a while. What’s more, a football club gives many of us part of our identity through the sense of belonging it bestows. Some take it to extremes and would be almost willing to die for their team.
Football brings many social benefits too. First and foremost, it can socially connect people of different backgrounds. Whether on the pitch itself, where children learn to work together, or in the canteen of the local football club, where villagers meet for a beer. This romantic image is only partially true, of course: we ought not to forget that the popular ball game can divide people just as effectively. You only have to think of the hooliganism and fan violence that are inextricably linked to the sport. It encourages the kind of ‘us and them’ thinking to which we human beings are all too prone.
The economic value of football is another important factor. In 2021, Dutch professional football delivered a contribution of 2.03 billion euros to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The sector is also a big employer in the Netherlands, offering the equivalent of no fewer than 3,254 full-time jobs in 2021. And the total figures will be even higher, as this does not take account of the amateur game.
Man the footballer
But why do we only tend to think of football in terms of its functionality? Surely the beautiful game has an intrinsic value of its own? The famous Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) would certainly have agreed. He saw the human being first and foremost as homo ludens, man the player. It is through play – football in this instance – that the human being blossoms and is actualized.
According to Huizinga, man the footballer is ideally free of the material influences of ‘normal’ life, free from the utilitarian thinking that dominates contemporary society. What he meant by this was that football ought not be judged by its contribution to society, as happens with any other activity: the sport already has a value in itself. All that matters in the throes of the ‘football state’ is the game, the excitement, the unpredictability and the joy. All the rest disappears and fades away. Fundamentally, football is not about politics, money or promoting health, but the activity itself, playing with a ball. We play for the sake of playing; we play football for the sake of playing football. No more, no less.
Huizinga’s views tie in seamlessly with something the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) once wrote: ‘Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.’ Human beings only become truly human when they play, because it is only in the game that they experience true freedom. Within the freedom of the game, we as footballers shed our nagging dreams and desires, our oppressive fears and traumas. Everyday reality is suspended and for a moment we experience redemption and enlightenment.
With the ball at our feet, we become human. And if that isn’t a good argument for the value of sport, what is? It’s time to see football again for what it is at its core: not a route to wealth or better physical fitness, but the common thread that links us as a humanity of players. From the ancient Chinese to the medieval folk footballers; from the Maya to us.
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