Art is in Football
If you consider yourself a fan of art, I’m begging you to give this a read, and hopefully change your mind.
[General stream of thought— might refine later into an actual structured essay.]
Art comes in many forms. For most people, art is books, poetry, and paintings. Art is intellectual and fits a narrow binary. You like art or you don’t.
But art is so much more, it’s in video games, it’s in sports, it’s in conversations.
Take football for instance, or ‘soccer’ if you’re wrong. Most fans of art will see being a football fan as something exclusive from being a fan of art. But take time to dissect it, away from its tribalism, its ‘lad culture’, its connotations of racism or sexism that pervade and infects people’s perceptions of it. Football is as beautiful as any painting or poem. The way the can curl ball in a million different directions depending on a dozen variables. The way players shift up and down the pitch in rhythm with the other twenty one players on the pitch like music. Goal celebrations are a form of self-expression. This is your defining moment, when you’ve changed the entire story of the game, how do you express yourself in front of the thousands of people in the stands and the millions of eyes glued onto their screen? There’s a reason football pictures are so iconic and why there’s so many of them. They represent a snapshot of raw emotions, captured in one thousandth of a second. Art is emotion, it’s how it makes you feel.
Football has the power to ruin your day or send you rocketing out of your seat and screaming in jubilation, your body moving before your mind can even process what happened.
Football is art, and if you’re a fan of art but not football, I’m begging you to give it a chance.