Football – the Beautiful Game Revelling in Ugliness. Oh, and the Sermon on the Mount

Once a week I play five a side football for an hour.

We play for fun, fitness and nobody needs to get hurt

There was a time when I was quite good at football, so also an exercise in nostalgia.

I watch Match of the Day, pre-recorded so I can fast forward the post mortem pundits.

But recently football has gotten too big for its boots.

Beautiful has become ugly, fun turns to fury, cheating is the new professional skill, money talks but mostly it spouts spite, and celebrity egos grow like giant hogweed, which is poisonous.

1. Global coverage of accusations and counter accusations of racism,
2. controversies about diving and simulating and cheating,
3. the crowd psychology of abuse rising at times to levels measured in units of hatred, 
4. levels of club indebtedness or billionaire subsidy that work on the economics of another planet,
5. expectations that match officials are omniscient, omnipresent and emotionless robots,
6. player celebrity status that achieves the rare combination of self-parodying silliness and ludicrous self importance.

These are only a few of the malignant prodigy growing inside a game ironically called the beautiful game.

A Christian critique of this cultural unwellness would provide considerable even formidable evidence of how far such a cultural phenomenon is from the Kingdom of God and the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.

No. Don't laugh. 

There's a research paper waiting to be written on values such as

1. meekness, peacemaking, and thirsting for the rightness of things
2. walking second miles,
3. not murdering others in our heart,
4. learning the meaning of standard of living from birds and flowers,
5. giving thanks for bread enough for today,
6. the lifegiving possibilities of forgiveness,
7. prayer as the daily recognition we are not the centre of the universe, even  our own inner universe.

Maybe I'll get to it. If football mirrors realities in our culture, such an analysis might show us some missiological open goals

For now – read the sensible, sane, humane and clear-eyed blogpost on the link below. It comes from a Eurosport reporter and it says of Premier League football – 'The Unhappiest Place in the World."

It combines social analysis, cultural critique, basic ethics of community life, informed reflection, and the honest way of seeing that notices the Emperor id naked.

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/armchair-pundit/unhappiest-place-earth-161812042.html