Football Hooligans and the birth of Jesus Christ.

Very few pairs could be more apparently opposite than the two I’ve just named. What might these things have in common? They both speak something about hope.

Football Clubs are a staple of hundreds of communities across the world. Virtually everywhere that English imperialism or just general European influence has spread, organizations have sprung up to administrate, even at the most rudimentary level, the goings-on and ins-and-outs of a football club. The football club is identical to what people mean when they talk about baseball clubs. The “backroom staff,” the “management,” or just simply “the club” are all names for the same thing. But, the club is difficult idea to pin down once we press it a little. What is a club? Is it the players? Is it the corporations that own the team? Is it the fans? In some countries, entire leagues boast having an entirely fan-owned structure; every single team in the league is jointly owned by the season ticket holders/share-holders or sometimes both. This is still largely the case in Germany’s top division of soccer, the Bundesliga. There are a handful of corporation/business owned clubs in the German top-flight now, but still to this day, the majority of the biggest clubs in Germany (and which regularly rank among the best in the world) are owned largely by the fans. This is very similar to the way that the Green Bay Packers are owned, to give you a Stateside example. But corporately owned or not, sports teams are a community staple. We don’t quite have that here in the U.S. By far, the most enfranchised sport in America is probably baseball. There are baseball clubs almost everywhere you go as a result of the minor league system that the MLB partners with. This pales in comparison to football/soccer culture in Europe. In Western Europe, the U.K. specifically (and England especially) there are football clubs in almost every town on the map. They range from groups of part-time, day-job-working weekend warriors (called Sunday-League teams) to massive multi-billion euro/pound/dollar industries that have 5x the money that the biggest NFL franchises have ever had. At nearly every level, however, these clubs generate some of the most fanatic fan culture in the world.

At their worst, international soccer fans are responsible for assaulting opposing fans of other teams, being safe-havens and cover ups for extreme right nationalists and race supremacists around the world, and rioting in ways that destroy almost entire city blocks at a time (win, lose, or draw). At their best, they are organizations that bring communities together under a similar banner (literally) and are places where people’s passion and fanaticism to see their team win causes them to stand for up to 95 minutes, jumping, singing, and chanting the entire time. But, even at their best, is the soccer club (or the baseball club or the football team or the whatever you want to input here) really all that good?

Over the past two or so week I’ve discovered a channel on YouTube called “Copa90.” The channel features soccer fans from all over the world, though largely from the U.K., coming together and creating content and material about their favorite thing: club soccer. Supporting clubs, going to matches all over Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America and glorifying “supporter culture” all over the world, Copa90 have created a lot of really well edited, interesting content. Even if you don’t like soccer, you’ll find their videos very engaging because they often look at the fan’s perspective of the game, talking about cultural and regional concerns, as opposed to the sports only side. They actually very rarely talk about soccer itself in technical terms. Copa90 are all about supporters the culture that surrounds the modern football/soccer club. But as I’ve watched more and more of their videos I’ve noticed something rather disturbing that has been slowly dawning on me for a long time. It all started last summer when I watched a documentary on a team in Wales, in the U.K., called Swansea City Association Football Club (pronounced Swanzee). I’ll spare you the details on the clubs difficult history and overcoming adversity, but one thing stuck out to me vividly that I would like to mention.

A young woman, near the end of the film, began describing her personal interaction with the club, and started off by speaking about a long bout she had been having with depression and anxiety. She said that one day, in the deepest throes of her depression, her father asked her if she wanted to go with him to Swansea match. For some unknown reason, she agreed. She recounted what she experienced there, with the raucous and rowdy yet family-like atmosphere created by the supporters, the excitement on the pitch, and the thrill of winning, and said that she that day decided that this was going to be a hobby she could really get behind. A hobby became an obsession for this young woman, and her support of Swansea City became her way of coping with her anxiety and depression. She is now for the most part recovered from her pitfall of depression, and at the end of the documentary, she said something that I will never forget. I’ve forgotten virtually every word before and after this phrase, but that young woman spoke about Swansea, saying “Swansea saved my life.”

“Swansea saved my life.”

While to many reading this, and statements like this, these kinds of beliefs may seem entirely benign, but it is one of the most subtly dangerous things anyone could ever believe. While watching Copa90 I’ve seen this very attitude get lifted up and touted as “passion.” People saying things like “Such-And-Such F.C. is my life.” “It’s what gets me up in the morning.” “It’s what I go to bed thinking about.” “It’s all the people here have; they have nothing else.” “It brings people together like nothing else.” People get up early, go to bed late, write about, dream about, blog about, make YouTube careers with, club soccer. My whole point so far is this; these people, who are no different than me or you or anyone else on planet Earth, who are made up of groups of people which are by a vast majority sane, intelligent, productive members of society, actually are putting their hope in a football club. Hope is not some pie-in-the-sky notion that is divorced from everything else we think about everything else, only pertaining to our notions of some kind of heaven, or reward; our hope is an active, living, breathing hungry part of our souls. When we go to our hope, it demands food. As often, if not more often, than your stomach demands the rest of your body and mind to move towards the goal of feeding you. What does hope eat, one might ask? Hope eats anything bigger than the person it’s in. Political parties, football clubs, communities, projects, plans, committees, titles, love, careers, heck, it’ll even try an inflated ego; if it takes more than two people to keep it going, if it elevates you above others, if it requires commitment, if it creates community, if there is any tiny paltry sensation of reward, you can safely bet that your hope will eat it right up. But all these aforementioned things are junk food. We know it, too. We go to bed anxious, upset, worried, lonely, angry, bitter, or just sad. We pretend that our vehicles for hope, our meals, are not really what they are. They’re just hobbies, while our hope of course is in that it’ll all be okay. Why? Because it just will, okay? ... Yeesh.

But we think feeding our hope more of the junk food of life, more responsibilities, more bigness, more organizations, more communities, more positive thoughts will satiate it but they never will.

The reason they never will is because our hope has a hunger that is eternal in nature. Pascal said that inside of every human soul is a “God-shaped vacuum.” We bring anything and everything towards that vacuum only to watch the little trinkets we throw in front of it fall into the abyss. We think the bigger the better, right? The more people, the more interaction, the more positive, the better, right? Some fan organizations are millions strong. But down they will go, too. We are, due to this, naturally hopeless. The only we get by with actually continuing to live and not killing ourselves, given that our hope is insufficient and we are starving, is by working so hard with the shovel to feed junk into the vacuum of our hope, that we mistake that endless working for hope with the actual experience of having hope. And this doesn’t even make us better people. For every young woman who says Swansea saved her life, there’s someone angry and bitter and actually filled with hate for the most bitter rival of the club. Even more, albeit much less likely to happen, there are people who will riot, bomb, attack, kill, and commit all kinds of lechery in the name of the club and the game, all the while in a drunken stupor. And for what? Does the club love you? Does the club help you? Even if you support a tiny little club where everyone does actually know everyone’s name, will the club go with you into eternity? Can you pack your supporter’s stand into your casket and march into the pearly gates chanting “You’ll Never Walk Alone” together? And what about when the club folds? Nowadays, in the world of crowdfunding and grassroots social media campaigns, it is a lot easier to save community institutions like soccer teams, but that doesn’t stop countless clubs from folding every year. Do you know how many clubs have founded and folded in the last 100 years? Hundreds in the U.K. alone. Can sports, and sports clubs really give you hope?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. If it sounds like I’m being sweeping here, I encourage you to please go and watch Copa90, or Kick TV, or any of the other dozen or so hobby channels on YouTube. If it sounds like I’m planting these things onto people when they aren’t really there, I’ve experienced these things myself. I’ve been where the fanatical supporter is at one point in my life. Don't get me wrong, hobbies are a really great way of broadening our horizons, meeting new people, and gaining new skills. But when hobbies enter the realm that for many supporters becomes their hope, it has crossed the line. And with a litany of other things we, all of us, have done the same thing.

This Christmas, before I can remember anything about hope, love, joy, or peace, I have to remember those days when I had no hope, no love, no joy, no peace, and no way to see where they were. When I did everything to ignore my hope because the alternative, real hope, carried with it a new life. It carried with it a sense of duty and obligation and bigness that I felt was too big for my hope-vacuum. Perhaps later on when I was boring, or when I didn’t have so much “life” to live, I would give this Jesus a try. But life is not life without hope, no matter where you find yourself. It’s chaining yourself to the fire of hobbies and identities and shoveling coal into the furnace 24/7. But all this shoveling is in opposition to our conscience which is telling us to pick up His shovel, and to chain ourselves to Him, and to work for His ends. Christ is our only hope primarily because he and His ends have no end. Only He is both alive now and never ending; both caring and perfect. He does put us to work, but His work is tearing us away from the love and desire of those petty, instantaneously gratifying things and helping us rest in Him. His work only works because He breaks in and unchains us from the furnaces we’ve attached ourselves too, and only He Himself will feed our hope adequately.

This Christmas, fan the flames of your hope in Christ by seeing your and the world’s utter human hopelessness. See the weakness of all else to settle the heart but the hope of Christ; not the hope of good here, but the hope of good forever after we leave this broken place. If you haven’t yet kindled that fire, Christ is willing and able to bring His fire to you. Look past the fleeting hopes of this world, and look to Him.

Merry Christmas, and Hope in Christ.