By Taleb Alrefai
There is a question that haunts me every time I sit before a screen or find myself inside a stadium, surrounded by tens of thousands, each of them holding their breath, hearts pulled toward a leather ball spinning across the green rectangle of grass: What is it that this game does to us? Many are the pleasures that grant the human soul some warmth and joy. Yet one among them remains the most bewildering, the most resistant to explanation: that collective madness which inhabits millions of people across all languages, colors, and creeds, their inexhaustible obsession with football.
History tells us that the roots of this game were first planted in ancient China more than two thousand years ago, before its modern rules emerged from England in 1863. One hundred and sixty-three years have passed, and the spell holds, stronger, wider, more insistent than ever. So where does the secret lie? Perhaps I can answer, at least in part, because I have carried this game inside me since childhood. I fell for it young, and that attachment has never left me.
Football gives the player a rare and singular pleasure, intimate at its core, yet collective in its expression. When a player scores, he does not soar alone in his euphoria. He takes his teammates with him, and in the same instant, he stirs something dormant in the depths of every spectator, those in the stadium and those watching thousands of miles away behind their screens. It is a purely universal moment, one that needs no translation.
What is truly striking is that the lovers of this game belong to no single human type. They are children and the elderly, men and women, philosophers and laborers, intellectuals and ordinary people who can barely put food on their table. Football asks nothing of your credentials, nothing of your bank balance. And perhaps that alone is a profound secret. Throughout the history of the game, few who walked onto its pitches arrived carrying university degrees.
Most of its greatest stars were born in alleyways and working-class neighborhoods, on dirt patches between crowded houses. Even giants like FC Barcelona have long dispatched their scouts into those very alleyways, searching the faces of playing children for some flicker of promise, before drawing them toward a journey capable of altering their destinies entirely — granting them what the most powerful corporations cannot, and what no stock exchange can offer even its most seasoned traders.
So why, to this degree, do human beings become so attached to football? Studies offer answers, and on the whole, they are persuasive ones: the simplicity of a game that requires nothing more than a patch of earth, a ball, and a gathering of people. Its remarkable ability to release suppressed emotions and unleash individual and collective passion. The safe space it provides for pleasure, expression, and even the thrill of a wager. It’s almost mythological power to create a star — someone who transforms overnight into a legend living inside the public imagination.
And above all, it’s extraordinary capacity to unify the feelings of entire peoples: different classes, generations, and factions melting into a single crucible for ninety minutes. These days, the World Cup is being played across Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Stadiums fill to their edges for every match. People scream with joy and weep with pain and disappointment, openly, unashamedly, without apology. And that too is a secret in itself. For where else in our daily lives are we given such a space to cry and shout at once, surrounded by tens of thousands, with no one thinking less of us for it?
Football is a game of enchantment. But perhaps its deepest enchantment lies in something no other entertainment industry can reliably promise: its power to suspend human sorrow, if only for a while. Its ability to say to the burdened heart: set your troubles aside for now, and look to the pitch. How precious that is, in an age when the heart unburdened by worry and grief has become a rare thing indeed. That is the biggest secret.
