What Does Football Mean?
An inquiry into football, questioning how a seemingly meaningless game generates profound significance and what this reveals about the nature of interpretation itself.
Yet for a hypothetical person encountering football for the first time, or for people like me who are very distant from it, searching for meaning might seem reasonable. In this text, I want you to think of yourself as an alien, a stranger to the human species.
We can think about the question “What does it mean?” in two different ways. The first is an attempt to understand the significance of all these strange movements and rules, to grasp why people do this. Why do so many people run after a ball, and why do thousands of others watch this completely useless activity? Why are such enormous sums of money spent on this absurd spectacle? This spectacle does not benefit the public; it makes no direct contribution to our culture, it teaches us nothing, nor does it serve a tangible, functional field like technology. Moreover, it does not belong to this geography; it is global. If we set aside for a moment the issues of play and entertainment and truly think about it, football is deeply meaningless.
When compared with daily life, a strange situation emerges, prompting questions. "Why are they making these comical movements that resemble nothing else?" "Why are there eleven people?" "Why is that flag there?" "If they want to move the ball, why don't they just pick it up with their hands?" "Why are they wasting their energy?" "Why are they wearing these costumes?" "Why is everything bound by absurd rules?"
The other way to ask the question “What does it mean?” is to ask what football actually means. It is clear that nothing means anything on its own. Abstract activities like football, especially, appear to mean nothing at all. The rules of football, the players, the positions, the objectives—all of it is self-referential; it has no initial connection to everyday life. We make football, or anything else for that matter, meaningful by relating it to other things. Here, we can follow a few different methods.
The first is to look at the dynamics of the game. This is largely what entertains people who enjoy watching football. The game has its own peculiar rules, which may seem absurd but are consistent and do not change from match to match. Although some changes have occurred throughout its history, the way we describe the game has not changed. What changes is what can be done within the scope of these rules. No two matches are the same. The football spectator enjoys thinking about these possibilities for variation, and sometimes enjoys seeing them realized. The majority of "commentary" on football is a discussion of these potentials. Questions like, “Why didn't he pass there?”, “I wish he had passed like this,” or “That player shouldn't be there” are all directed at the game and have no direct relation to the everyday world.
What does all this mean to us? It conveys what can be done within a boundary (physical boundaries like the field, its lines, and time, as well as the rules of the game). It shows what kinds of moves the players can make in this limited, abstract universe, how they can use their bodies and minds, their concentration and conditioning, and how the manager can evaluate time and strategies. “How much preparation was made for the match?” “What is the state of viewer support?” “What are the physical conditions of the field?” “Is the weather rainy or clear?” “How objective is the referee?” The dynamics are endless. The entire match exists, it seems, just so we can talk about it.
On the other hand, football has a great history, a memory. This memory helps in comparing the relationships between matches and also influences how the next match will be played. No one enjoys football by looking at a single match in isolation. The past and the future are always included in the match. History, on the other hand, shows how sophisticated the game has become since the 19th century.
Some people might think this kind of meaning-making is too disconnected from life. However, we can also make football meaningful by relating it to life. This field is vast. From class struggles to capitalist concepts of entertainment, from computer games to the stock market, from the press to sociocultural strata, from sexual identities to hooliganism, from politics to nutrition, from street football to infrastructure projects, it is difficult to find something that we cannot relate to football. These are not things directly related to football itself, that is, the game and its dynamics. But if our concern is to search for meaning, meaning-making is easy, as long as we know how to ask questions.
Some might also be interested in the decorative aspects of the game. For example, they might be interested in the players' uniforms, how handsome they are or their private lives, team crests, trophies, the shapes of footballs, or stadium architecture. Some people might even be interested in simulations of the game, management games, transfers, betting, old football recordings, football sponsors, fan slogans, anthems, collector's items, football posters, or the TV graphics shown during a match.
What generally interests a classic football spectator, however, is the relationship between the rules and the game, strategy and field setup, and analyzing the relationship of external factors to the game. This is what makes the game meaningful. And it is we who establish these relationships; the game has no meaning on its own. It is truly difficult to explain this to someone who has never seen football, never been to a match, never participated in football conversations, does not know the history of football, and has not grasped the relationship between humans and the game. Fortunately, the football spectator or those who play it have no such concerns.