Football Is a Metaphor for Life
Written by Miranda Vidak
12/23/20221 min read
When I first heard the ’22 World Cup is to be held in Qatar, a non-football country, in the middle of the winter, I was offended. How dare you? World Cup is an event, the occurrence you watch in your tank top and shorts, half drunk in the middle of the day, talking smack with your friends and anonymous enemies online belonging to a country yours is playing against.
This was blasphemy, I thought.
You robbed us of this, I thought.
And yet, this particular World Cup and all its dramaturgy worth of a volume of one Shakespeare or at least a Sartre, delivered so much, in the exact time we needed it, finishing off not just 2022, but a period of taxing two years with a bow-out worth of Broadway.
What is she going on about, talking about football, you ask? Child. Please.
Football is a metaphor for life itself. If you didn’t grow up in a country that plays football (sorry, I can not write the word ‘soccer’ more than just this one time) you might feel this story isn’t for you; I implore you to stay. It might be more for you than you think.
Football is a sport. Naturally, there are 22 guys running, trying to do something. But within life, football becomes the language with which we interpret life itself. It’s a metaphor for belonging. It’s about who you are, but even more so who you are not. Football is political, emotional, scandalous, and revealing. It has acting, falling, elbowing; just like life.
Pier Paolo Pasolini once said - “Football is a complete language, with its syntax, lexicon, and grammar, and the language of football offers the power of understanding, communication between people who understand it.” Pier Paolo also said that there is football prose and football poetry. The prose is primarily related to European teams, poetry to Latin American teams.”