I’m employed by SCORE, which is a sports chaplaincy that co-ordinates and resources chaplains throughout sport — rugby, football, horse racing, athletics. . . My role is to support, train, and encourage chaplains in any of the 92 clubs in the professional English League, including Welsh teams like Swansea and Cardiff.
About 70 clubs have chaplains. There are lots of good things going on in chaplaincy at the moment, but not everyone knows about them, so my job is to encourage chaplains to share good practice.
Lots of the funding for this post is coming from the PFA [Professional Footballers’ Association], the Premier League, and the Football League Trust, so I sit down with them and other football bodies to hear from them what are the pastoral needs within the football industry. Then I can be that conduit between them and the chaplains, helping the chaplains to meet those needs.
I’m chaplain to Charlton Athletic as well — been chaplain to them for the last ten years — so I’ve got a bit of experience across the different divisions.
I’ve been passionate about my faith and football since I was at school. I was pastor of a church for 17 or 18 years. About ten years ago, I was sitting in my office one day and the phone rang. It was someone who knew I was interested in football, and he asked if I knew that the chap at Charlton was moving on.
You’ve got to have some understanding and appreciation of the sport. There’s a particular culture in football. You see thousands and thousands of people, week in, week out, going along to watch the same team — even when they’re going badly — and quite a lot of people still support the club they grew up near. I think there’s something deep-rooted there, perhaps a bit tribal. Looking at football from the inside and knowing the people involved, you realise it’s not a nine-to-five job. The managers — they put so much passion into it, it can be all-consuming. And there’s that desire to win, as well.
I wasn’t surprised by the reaction to John Terry’s affair. The players would see themselves as let down. There’s a strong “band of brothers” code among players. Of course there are all kinds of moral issues, but the way in which people have responded has been quite media-driven. In a week when the Iraq inquiry was going on, and the MPs’ expenses claims, it fascinated me to see what sells papers and what people are interested in — what matters in our society. Perhaps there are other things that are more important.
The England manager, Fabio Capello, came out of it very well. He showed strong leadership. He thought about his response and then didn’t hang around. I understand he has a strong Catholic faith, and is quite a disciplinarian.
I think football is redeemable. There are some wrong things, but there are also lots of positives. It can be a very positive influence on society. For example, it’s definitely affected anti-racism in the last 20 years. Another example is Charlton’s football com-mittee’s response to the spate of teenage murders in London: “Street violence ruins lives”. The players wore that message on their shirts in a game against Millwall before Christmas, and that message could be rolled out nationally.
Young people can become scholars at an academy or a centre of excellence, where their education continues but the football training is focused. Their hope is that they’ll be offered professional terms at the end of the two years. David Beckham and Wayne Rooney would have come up through that route. We like to get involved with these 16-17-year-olds, offering support, guidance, life-skills, tackling bullying, helping them to handle success and failure.
The Football League is keen that we extend that, because thousands of boys are playing across the country, from the ages of seven or eight, and they have pastoral needs. Their parents have, too. In my football club we recently had some redundancies, and several people who were told they were at risk took me up on the offer to talk about things. Sometimes people have bereavements or news of a terminal illness. But we have a limited capacity: there are four full-time sports chaplains for football, rugby, horse racing, and international events, but the rest are all ministers of churches who have just one day a week to offer. There are 110 football chaplains and about 50 or 60 in other sports.
I’ve always liked the Brazilian players, the skills they’ve got and what they do with the ball.
Kaká, the Brazilian player, is definitely one of the best players around. He’s an incredibly skilful player and very generous with his money, very generous with his time, supporting causes that he believes in, and open about being a Christian. He was nearly signed by a Premiership club, and there was a lot of talk about the money he would earn, but I suspect that there were other reasons for him not to come. I like someone who stands up for what he believes in.
I’ve never experienced the difference between earning £50,000 a week and £150,000, or what it enables you to do. It’s an extortionate amount of money. But it’s what the club pays. It’s what you do with the money that matters. Going back to scripture, it’s the love of money which is the root of all evil. Kaká has positively affected people’s lives, and there’s a charity called Faith and Football set up by Linvoy Primus and others which puts good into the lives of others.
I might be naïve, but I’d say most younger players are there because they love football, not because they want to be millionaires. It’s like being a musician or a dancer — you just want to do it because it’s in you.
When I went to an interview for my secondary school at the age of ten, I did say I wanted to be a professional footballer. Unfortunately, at that school it was called soccer — still, they let me in. My dad took me to football first, and my granddad was a keen follower. From seven or eight, when I first started at school, I found I wasn’t bad at it, and became captain at school, and played at university. Sid Ellis, who played left-back in Charlton back in the ’50s, coached me in the Boys’ Brigade. He was a strong influence, and helped me a lot.
When I was about eight, I went to a toy service. I don’t remember the sermon or the preacher, but what he said about Jesus really resonated with me, and I went home and said a prayer. All I can say is, like Wesley, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.” When I was 13, I made a slightly more mature commitment. I’m now in my early 40s, and my belief in Jesus has always influenced my life, my decisions, my relationships.
I followed my heart and my passions. I qualified as a solicitor in the early ’90s, but was preaching and supporting people pastorally, so I went off to Spurgeon’s Baptist Training College and came back to be the pastor of my church in Charlton, about ten miles from there.
I’m a bit of mixed bag: brought up in the Church of England, Baptist training college, and then a pastor in a Christian Fellowship church which came out of the house-church movement back in the 1980s. I was attracted by the more informal style of worship and the involvement of different people in leading.
One of my favourite Bible passages, one I’ve often preached on, is from Philippians, when Paul talks about pressing on with the race, and the part in Hebrews about running the race, fixing your eyes on Jesus. That whole team ethic, pressing on, achieving, helping others — a lot tips over very easily into the Christian life.
I’m not good at a secular/Christian divide. I always prefer the more holistic, Hebrew approach to life — enjoying sport, enjoying ourselves.
I’ve been happily married for 15 years to Helen, and we have three boys aged ten, seven, and three. The oldest boy plays in a team, and the little one is interested, but the middle one is more into gymnastics.
Marrying Helen was the most important decision of my life. I’m Calvinistic enough to believe that the heart-being-strangely-warmed thing was not what I chose, but who chose me. Whereas if I’d got that wrong, what would my life have been?
I’d like to be remembered as a good dad. I’d love my boys to grow up and pass that on to their kids, and that would be something that would last a hundred years.
I’ve admired Eugene Petersen’s theology over the years. I did manage to meet him in Canada, once. He has a real grasp of what the gospel’s all about.
Fairtrade? It’s coffee more than anything else. I love coffee.
I’m not really an angry person, but I do feel anger about any mistreatment of children. And why have we got to the point when teenagers are carrying knives?
I’m happiest when I’m on holiday with my family, and the boys are playing (not arguing), and I’m sitting with a pint in my hand.
I’m positive, not gloom-and-doom like some Christians. I remember seeing a poster in Canada of Jesus holding the world. It read: “We don’t know what the future holds but we do know who holds the future.”
I’d like to be locked in a church with Barack Obama. I have a lot of respect for people who grow into leadership positions. I’d like to listen to him — and pray with him. He must carry a lot.
Matt Baker was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.
www.scorechaplaincy.org.uk