I watched the 2022 World Cup when I was in pain, and football helped opiate it. Our uncle had just been murdered back home in Sri Lanka, my children had scarlet fever, and I was stuck in godless England. Football is the closest thing they have to a religion in Europe and is the most widely available opiate for the masses. So I took it.

When Karl Marx called religion the ‘opiate of the masses’ it was this effect that he was talking about. Relief from a world of suffering. Marx said,“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

This language of suffering pervades all religion as, indeed, suffering pervades life itself. The Buddha's said the life is suffering, and offered a path out. Jesus Christ bore unbearable suffering upon his own body, and people still worship the cross he bore it on. The language of suffering also permeates football, as you can hear from the post-modern messiah, Lionel Messi.

Messi as Messiah

In his first interview after the World Cup, Lionel Messi said,

There was so much suffering, because there were times when I suffered a lot with the national team, the finals we lost, being so close without it finally happening. I had so much criticism in every way possible. And my family suffered just like me, or even worse. And we closed that circle by winning the America Cup, the World Cup, and that’s it, there’s nothing left to win.

Messi, suffered and overcame, like a messiah of the meaningless. As a final trial, Messi had to experience the passion of the penalty kicks, while the spirits of a billion people hovered around him and watched. Messi explicitly thanked God and the unholy ghosts of a global television audience, saying, “all that energy, and everyone wanting this, that’s what made this happen.” If that wasn't a religious experience, what is?

To understand what a religious experience is, however, we'll turn to another source. Robert Bellah and his book Religion and Human Evolution. I have yet to finish the tome, but I've started it many times, and the book talks about football.

Religion And Human Evolution

In Religion and Human Evolution, Bellah offers a few definitions of religion. Paraphrasing Clifford Geertz, he said, “religion is a system of symbols that, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence.” Bringing in Émile Durkheim, he said, “Religion is a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred that unite those who adhere to them in a moral community.”

To use a modern metaphor, religion is a program which 'computes' across many human brains to produce results. In this sense, asking whether Jesus really rose from the dead or if the Buddha really had past lives is missing the point. The point is not the symbols but symbol manipulation to produce a result. For example, if you watch a video, it's actually a bunch of photographs and those photographs are a bunch of numbers (or chemicals). Nothing about the movie experience is true, but it feels true to life, truer than life even. A bunch of symbols which aren't 'true' (ceci n'est pas un pipe!) can produce an experience that is. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as the holy emerges from its supplicants. This is the nature of the religious experience, and having experiences in general.

The fact is that we have no direct access to facts at all. Our entire perceptual system is a sampling device as crude as the movie camera when faced with the great infinity in front of us. Our eyes sample a fraction of available light, encode it as a crude, wet map on the back of our retinas, then flip it right side up and process it at the back of our brains. This produces a simulation of reality that's out of date as soon as we perceive it. Other creatures can see different things than us, or perceive at different speeds, we have no particular access to truth on any metaphysical level. It's all a simulation, at the very base level of perception. We are all just wet sacks of temperature controlled ocean, moving towards or away from the light, not much different from the first life forms. Indeed, there's a convincing argument that we're just spaceships for microbes to walk about on land, with consciousness as a crude navigation system.

Out of this unreal individual experiences we build an even more complex realm of unreality we call daily life. The illusion of daily life starts from the 'photograph' of individual experience but it becomes a 'movie' through many shared experiences across a society. Humans are deeply social animals, and our cognition is deeply social. For proof of this, have someone die. We feel pain in other bodies.

In the artificial world we've created, stop signs, legal notices, and warnings are all social signs which are more life and death than any cues from the natural world. What humans casually call 'the real world' (get a job, pay your bills) is actually completely artificial. As Bellah said,

If we follow the analysis of Alfred Schutz, the notion that the world of daily life is uniquely real is itself a fiction that is maintained only with effort. The world of daily life, like all the other multiple realities, is socially constructed. Each culture, each era, constructs its own world of daily life, never entirely identical with any other. Even the meaning of “standard” time and space differs subtly between cultures, and fundamental conceptions of person, family, and nation are all culturally variable.

Now that we've deconstructed everything, we can return to Bellah's definition of religion (and connect it to football). He described religion as a set of symbols which gives rise to a powerful sense of general order. He also described religion as related to 'the sacred', but then said, “Even this simple definition raises immediately a second definitional issue: What is the sacred?”

Is Nothing Sacred?

To me, you can understand what's sacred to a place by simply looking up. In ye olde days, the highest building would be a religious one. Today it's full banks and empty apartments. Today we obviously worship money, just look up. When I was in England, for example, I saw churches into bars and my friends went to silent discos in cathedrals. The critique of religion is complete in Europe, where it's viewed as an increasingly atavistic curiosity, or dangerous. Marx called it long ago when he said, “For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism… The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.”

Our pride at discovering that religion is 'made up,' however, merely goeth before the fall. Everything is made up! The Buddha said everything is illusion, but he still used a name and told stories, because some illusions are useful. Science and secularism are not actually higher truths, they're just higher fidelity illusions. It's like bragging that you've built an 8K cinema and then screening a horrorshow where you kill 99% of life on Earth. The point of a movie is how it moves you, not how it moves pixels. People were better off in a flickering cave worshiping animals and trees, because then at least they had some motivation to not genocide them.

Even if the devil isn't 'real', such an idea can keep you from worshiping money and worldly things, which society now does as a matter of both interest and principal. They say the love of money is the root of all evil, and this is the square root of capitalism! Usury was forbidden in Christianity, but now whole economies are based on such exploitation. Nothing is sacred in western civilization, so that's where such civilization leads, nowhere. The planetary Ponzi called capitalism is crashing, and taking the whole planet with it. All people really have left is distractions. Nothing is sacred.

One of the few sacralized spaces in modern life is the football stadium. On the football pitch, rules are followed, workers are paid well, managers are fired, and everything isn't monopolized, it's a perfect simulation of capitalism not how it is, but how it's imagined. This simulation is one of the few places that make sense in a world gone mad, and is thus an escape for the masses. As Diego Maradona—the John the Baptist to Messi's messiah—said, “football isn’t a game, nor a sport; it’s a religion.” The man was touched by the hand of God, and he had a point.

The Post-Modern Religion

Now, finally, we can get to Bellah's direct comments on football. Bellah said,

Games such as football artificially create a separate reality. Football operates not with standard time and space but with the bounded time and space of the game. Football events occur only on the football field. If, for example, a pass is caught out of bounds, it doesn’t count as a catch, for it did not occur in game space. Game time is one hour, but it is suspended for a variety of reasons and usually lasts about three hours of standard time. Most centrally, football plays with the anxieties of the world of working, the striving for pragmatic advantage. Unlike the world of daily life, one hour of game time produces a clear result: someone wins and someone loses, or occasionally there is a tie.

Bellah, of course, was talking about American football, but I'm going to lump them together because American football is just football inverted, where the fouls are rules. In American football you're supposed to use your hands and tackle people to the point of brain damage, and this is somehow still called football because Americans insist on being difficult. American football is the fentanyl to the opium of football football.

Football football is a completely artificial reality where men run around like demented penguins, tormenting an egg. In that bounded space, men do not have hands at all, except for the goalie. Football also operates outside of normal spacetime, with 'injury time' being added back to the self-contained universe at the end. It operates, as Bellah described, “not with standard time and space but with the bounded time and space of the game.” And it plays with the “anxieties of the world of working,” squeezing and releasing them in the simulated spacetime of 90 minutes.

In one way or another, billions of people escape the 'real' world of daily life into this artificial reality they call football. As Bellah said, “one of the first things to be noticed about the world of daily life is that nobody can stand to live in it all the time.” Or as the Buddha says, life is suffering and this (the dhamma) is a way out. As Messi showed, football is a simulated suffering which has the possibility of satisfaction in this life. Whereas following the dhamma takes multiple lifetimes, football lets you check out immediately (though, like the Hotel California, you can never leave). You can only check out for 90 minutes at a time, give or take. Even more than religion, this opiate wears off quite quickly. Luckily there's such demand that men run around basically all year, sacrificing their hamstrings to relieve other men's suffering.

Inverted Consciousness

I don't share Marx's antipathy with religion, but I agree with his point that religion co-evolves with humanity. That ideas and reality are connecting, and shape each other in turns (material dialectics, as dimly as I understand it). Marx said, “Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But, man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.”

Marx might as well be describing the inverted football that Americans play. American football depicts the state of the place, a bunch of debt slaves (in college) playing gladiatorial games that lead to brain damage, with a tiny amount of obscenely wealthy people serving as proof of concept. European football also describes European states, completely dependent on foreign capital and foreign labor to produce anything interesting. If you look closely, sport is really all that's left of Roman civilization after they ditched the Catholicism. As my old Roman World Atlas tells me about those, frankly, better times, “The plebs also received cash donations from time to time, and were kept entertained by games and shows. Their enthusiasm for the new regime was unbounded.” Today it's just circuses without the bread.

Thus, in godforsaken Europe, enough people gather to overthrow their comically corrupt governments every weekend. Instead, they watch billionaires play with their millionaire toys, while gambling and drinking themselves into more poverty. Every football match is a deep display of class unconsciousness. People that earn £30,000 a year gamble on passport slaves earning £300,000 a week while billionaires lose millions on the whole thing and laugh. In states that consciously separate themselves from religion, football is something of a state religion. The secular distractions of the Roman Empire are all that's left among its godless descendants.

Football and Capitalism

In these ways, these states (really just one White Empire) produce a form of religion that matches them. As Marx said, “an inverted consciousness of the world.” Football is capitalism where managers are actually held accountable, where workers are paid exorbitantly, and which produces consistent results. It's a simulation of capitalism where capitalism isn't completely broken.

In football, unlike in the 'real' world, Black people and immigrants can get ahead on pure talent. If anything, they're over-represented. In football, nobody decides to fire half the team and replace them with chatbots and call centers. And, in football, the masses don't have to just take it. They can get the manager and sometimes the owners 'fired' if they yell enough. It's a deeply satisfying illusion that keeps men trapped in a deeply unsatisfying situation. As Marx said, “To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”

Football is not necessarily a capitalist expression anymore than Christianity is necessarily Roman, but it has been co-opted this way just as Christianity was into Roman society. As Marx said, describing football as well as European Christianity, “Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification.”

Football has thus become the living logic of capitalism. Where competition actually A) exists and B) leads to workers getting rewarded. It is also its spiritual point of honor, in that fair play and hard work are measured and compensated. Any given match day—whether their team wins or loses—spectators can receive both consolation and justification. Whatever the result, people agree on the general rules, and in that they find communion. Everybody can walk away believing (most of the time) that the system is fair and makes sense, and deceived that this system is a reflection of the world they live in, and not, in fact, a perverse inversion.

Football is the hopiate of the masses. You can always hope that your team will win. Football is the dopiate of the masses, especially if you mix it with drinking and gambling. Football is the copiate of the working classes, it's the one place a working man can catch a break.

For godless nations, football is a religion. For suffering people, football is a drug. Marx thought some higher class consciousness would replace religion in Europe, but it obviously hasn't. People are just looking at their feet, while the world crashes down around them. Especially when you mix football with what they advertise—betting and drinking—it's quite a powerful opiate, distributed on a massive scale. Football, not religion, is the opiate of the masses. And, I must say, having tried it, the gear is good.