FOR me, as for many fans of a certain age, watching the World Cup kick off last week in the Azteca stadium, in Mexico City, brought back powerful memories. In 1970, as an eight-year-old, I watched TV, transfixed, as a brilliant Brazilian team won the trophy against Italy. Players seemingly became artists, not just athletes. They danced rather than ran, pirouetted around tackles, conjured with the ball instead of just kicking it. Suddenly, I realised what this sport could be.

I was watching the game, having negotiated with my clergyman father early release from evensong duties for me and fellow choristers. Some may find this kind of compromise verging on the blasphemous. But football’s relationship with religion is worth pondering for believers and fans. My father’s first experiences as curate and parish priest had been in the north-east of England, where he had learned that football was a vitally useful part of pastoral conversation as he visited homes and workplaces.

When he became the Bishop of Newcastle, in 1973, he joined what I have discovered is a distinguished group of episcopal fans of the city’s football club: Newcastle United. They have included Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster, who, as he approached retirement, told Pope John Paul II (a noted former goalkeeper) that he was looking forward to spending more time watching his favourite team.

The first female Bishop of Newcastle, the Rt Revd Christine Hardman, was a season-ticket holder at the club, and described in her maiden speech to the House of Lords in 2016 her region’s “places of pilgrimage such as Holy Island — or St James’ Park” (the Newcastle stadium). The current Bishop of Sheffield, Dr Pete Wilcox, happily describes himself as a “Newcastle United nut”.

And the stadium itself, in Newcastle, as elsewhere, is a place that often seems to echo the habits and rituals of religious worship. Footballers have become increasingly open to public expressions of faith. Some fans’ behaviour does, of course, seem to undermine such comparisons. My son Ewan, a devoted football fan and theology student, was fascinated, however, by the way in which football crowds engage in communal singing, expressions of defiant belief, or moving remembrance of past fans and players.

When Andrés Iniesta scored the winner in the 2010 World Cup final, he lifted his Spain shirt to reveal another underneath with a tribute to Dani Jarque, a former teammate who had died the previous year from a heart attack, but was “siempre con nosotros” (always with us). For Iniesta, a moment of ecstatic joy, the greatest a player could imagine, could still be celebrated alongside expressing grief.

That kind of commemoration has come to mean much to me, as I have faced the grief of Ewan’s death from brain cancer in 2022 (Feature, 12 September 2025). We talked together frequently about football, and I was surprised to find that my grief was sometimes most intense when it came to considering returning to following football without him. But, after a time, I found a way of combining continued devotion to the sport with grateful recognition of what we had shared.

All this does not mean that I can ignore all the pressures — political and commercial, and harmful gambling — which threaten to undermine “the beautiful game”. The current World Cup is attracting much criticism for excessive ticket and transport costs. Yet there is no denying its global appeal: football is arguably one of the most impressive and enduring British inventions and exports of recent centuries. It is heartening that, despite all the tensions currently in the world, so many people will be focusing on their nations’ playing of sport against one another in the coming weeks.

“Football”, Ewan once wrote, “deals with the natural undulations of human life: the fluctuations between joy and agony, expectation and despair which shape all our experiences.” He was far from blind to aspects of the game which seem far from the spiritual, but he believed that football and religion could benefit each other: “The architecture, art, and rituals of religious traditions offer football models for embodying and communicating powerful shared convictions, just as the commitment and passion of the football fan might be able to teach the believer something about the trials of holding to unconditional faith and irrational hope.”

Chris Bowlby is a writer and broadcaster. His book No Complacency: Life, death, football, and the cathedral on the hill is published by Herne Books at £20 (Church Times Bookshop £18). It will be reviewed in next week’s Church Times.

Andrew Brown writes this week’s Analysis. Read it here.

Listen to an interview with Chris Bowlby on the Church Times Podcast here