Football: a detachment from space and time
Humans use space and time to peg experiences and events into temporality. Without it, we would be simply experiencing events one after the other, relying on an imperfect and subjective memory to (unsuccessfully) keep us afloat. Before technology, humans relied on the passing of seasons and the sun’s rotation to cement experiences in space and time.
When we manipulated the material around us to wrestle nature into submission, we began to talk of time, calendars, geography, kilometres and epochs. As technology proliferated and memories became less subjective, less unreliable, and turned into observable records, we grew more self-aware. As we became more self-aware of ourselves we became more aware of one another, and ‘being aware’ of your neighbour turned into ‘beware’ of your neighbour. So we became more tribal, then sectarian, and finally we became a species stuck somewhere between regionalism and nationalism. In this latter period of our existence, football played a prominent role amongst large swaths of the population, and the clubs became symbols of cities and regions. Football clubs reified space, time, and communities, and the shirts that the football players carried on their shoulders, reified the culture and traditions of the cities or regions they were representing. Whole cities were divided into red, blue, green, or yellow, factions, and clubs became proxies for…