When Europeans first arrived in the Americas, indigenous populations had almost no resistance to the many pathogens that had sailed with them. The results were catastrophic. Half a millennium later, by contrast, the inhabitants of the United States and Canada believe they have developed powerful antibodies, ensuring that most of them are immune to the most contagious and debilitating pathogen of all: football.
The quadrennial World Cup began on Thursday, yet an impressive number of Americans could not care less about the event they are co-hosting with Canada and Mexico. It is not just that they insist on calling the game “soccer” (originally an English contraction of Association Football). It is more that their attention is elsewhere: specifically, on the NBA finals, where the Knicks are just one win away from making history—not to mention hockey’s Stanley Cup. Soccer, meanwhile, is the favorite spectator sport of just one in every 20 Americans, according to Gallup, an improvement on the 2 percent in polls between 1937 and 2004, but still lean pickings—and a rounding error compared to the 41 percent for the NFL and college football. Even among young Americans ages 18 to 29—many more of whom have played the game than their parents and grandparents—soccer is the favorite of just 8 percent, compared with 28 percent for football and 13 percent for basketball.
How, then, to explain to an American the addictive power of the game most people on Earth call football? Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch: A Fan’s Life(1992) is surely the best book on the subject.
Fever Pitch is a book about addiction—addiction to football. It holds up an unsparing mirror to every man who has ever fallen under the spell of “the beautiful game.” It is one of the few books I have ever read that made me feel uneasily that I might have inadvertently written it myself, perhaps in one of those tedious summers when there was no World Cup to feed my craving. These days, they say alcoholism is a disease. Well, so is football. But the symptoms are much worse. Alcohol is a relaxant; the headache comes the next morning. Footballism is self-harm from the kickoff.
Hornby was 11 years old when he attended his first Arsenal match. He immediately spotted that the football crowd—tens of thousands, nearly all men—was unlike any other crowd he had encountered. In the cinema or the theater, “though occasionally one might spot a fidgety child or a yawning adult, I hadn’t ever noticed faces contorted by rage or despair or frustration. Entertainment as pain was an idea entirely new to me, and it seemed to be something I’d been waiting for.”
Entertainment as pain. Every football fan knows what he is talking about.
I grew up in Glasgow, where football is a branch of religion: Rangers for the Protestants, Celtic for the Catholics, Partick Thistle for the atheists. Glaswegians support their teams with a zeal that frequently spills over into violence. We do not go to football to munch on hot dogs; we go to sing belligerent songs laced with sectarian hatred, pregnant with the possibility of a punch-up. But the singing and fighting are really just ways to assuage the dread of seeing your team lose.
When I moved south, to England, I became an Arsenal fan—like Hornby’s father—partly to compensate my older boys for their parents’ divorce, but mainly so that they could experience what I had experienced: the searing emotional experience of being football crazy. There’s even a Scottish song on the subject: “He’s fitba’ crazy, he’s fitba’ mad / And the fitba’ it has robbed him o’ / the wee bit sense he had.” As Hornby observes, we do not watch football to experience pleasure. We go to suffer.
Just three weeks ago, Arsenal won the English Premier League for the first time in 22 years. But the celebrations were more therapeutic than cathartic, for—within days of clinching that title—Arsenal agonizingly lost the European Champions League final to Paris Saint-Germain. This truly was entertainment as pain—a game finally decided after extra time in a penalty shoot-out, with the crucial kick missed by our most reliable defender, the Brazilian Gabriel. I have four sons, of whom the youngest, Campbell, is the most football crazy. As the ball soared over the bar to dash our dreams, he wept. (His older brothers have learned to manage the agony with dry eyes and foul language. Swearing is an integral part of the whole experience.)
“Come on,” I said to Campbell. “Let’s go outside, and we’ll replay the match in a parallel universe, and you’ll take the penalty instead of Gabriel.” And so we did. And of course he slammed the ball into the back of the net. It didn’t get rid of the pain. But it made it manageable. It stopped the tears.
Hornby is very good on the warped psychology of football craziness. Why on Earth was Campbell crying, when we had just won the Premier League? I think partly because it hadn’t sunk in that we’d actually done it. As Hornby recalls of Arsenal’s lean years in the 1970s and 1980s, after a certain point winning the league “becomes something you either believe in or you don’t, like God.”
You concede that it’s possible, of course, and you try to respect the views of those who have managed to remain credulous. Between approximately 1975 and 1989 I didn’t believe. I hoped, at the beginning of each season; and a couple of times—the middle of the 86/87 season, for example, when we were top for eight or nine weeks—I was almost lured out of my agnostic’s cave. But in my heart of hearts I knew that it would never happen, just as I knew that they were not, as I used to think when I was young, going to find a cure for death before I got old.
And then, as in 1989, and as in 2026, it finally happens. God turns out to exist, after all, and Arsenal wins the league. To the young addict, it’s almost too much. Even his dad has found it hard to process. My recurrent nightmare is that it was only a dream.
Throughout the world—except in the United States and Canada—football is the process by which boys become men. It is how I learned, and how I have taught my sons, to deal with life’s challenges, including the minor things, such as death or divorce, and the really big things, such as losing to Paris Saint-Germain on penalties. Through football we learn not to cry. Through football we learn that every defeat will be followed, as day follows night, by another game, and another chance of victory. Through football we learn that no man is an island—that both despair and joy should never be experienced in isolation but always in the crowd. Through football we learn how to converse and establish trust with perfect strangers on the other side of the world. My youngest was a chronic introvert before football. Now he knows the key to connection: Just bring up the penalty that Arsenal should have been awarded at a crucial moment in the Paris Saint-Germain game. What was the [expletive deleted] referee thinking?
Football, in other words, is primal. It is tribal. We are Arsenal fans. We get to sing the Arsenal songs at our rivals: “You’ll always be shit! You’ll always be shit! Tottenham Hotspur, you’ll always be shit!” Or the one we used to sing when we were playing Liverpool: “We pay your benefits, we pay your benefits . . . . ” Or for Chelsea: “Are you Tottenham, are you Tottenham, are you Tottenham in disguise?” There are many more, and each season at least one new chant mysteriously emerges, like the acephalous murmuration of birds. And this is true wherever football is played. (Explore the wonderful Fan Chants website if you don’t believe me.)
Forget Yankees and Red Sox. American sporting rivalries don’t come close, partly because the greater distances between cities make the contingents of “away” fans too small to be worth taunting. As a general rule, fans of rival football teams are seated separately, with platoons of stadium security and police to prevent the pitched battles that were a regular occurrence when I was growing up.
In a legendary interview, Bill Shankly—the tough-as-nails Scotsman who was the manager of Liverpool F.C. from 1959 to 1974—summed it up: “Somebody said that football’s a matter of life and death to you. I said, ‘Listen, it’s more important than that.’ ” We all knew what he meant.
So, Americans, brace yourself for weeks of patriotism, jingoism, nationalism, chauvinism—call it what you like. Prepare to repel inebriated Scotsmen clad in kilts and Braveheart face paint. Heaven help your city if the fates pit England against Germany in your local stadium, but at least you will understand why the English are chanting, “Two World Wars and one World Cup!”
Still baffled? Let me help you make the imaginative leap. Suppose there were an American football game between the states of the Union and those that formed the Confederacy. How might that feel?
And yet I can never quite shake off the feeling that World Cup fans are cosplaying nationalism. Why? Because true football fans owe their principal loyalty to their clubs, not to national teams. The World Cup is really just a summer vacation for the serious Gunner or Gooner (as we Arsenal fans are known). Unlike the Premier League, it is a contest between (in political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson’s great phrase) “imagined communities.” Once again, Hornby nails this. As a teenager he developed “a deep antipathy towards players from Tottenham, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester United. I began to squirm when watching England games on TV, and to feel, as many of us feel, that I had no connection whatsoever with what I saw”—least of all with the generally odious England fans of that era.
Far from being a carnival of nationalism, my American friends, the World Cup is the last grim joke on humanity of the entity that spread football to every corner of the globe except the United States. Yes, you thought you’d thrown off the imperial yoke 250 years ago with your Declaration of Independence and its fine words about the pursuit of happiness. You were so wrong.
The penultimate governor of Aden—the former British colony that is now the capital of Yemen—once wisely observed that, “when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression ‘Fuck off.’ ”
Football’s not coming home this year (as the England fans vainly wish it would every four years). It is seeking finally to subjugate the rebellious republic—to snuff out those eccentric games that no one else plays—and to replace the pursuit of happiness with entertainment as pain.
And if you still seriously think you’re immune to football fever, you know what you can do, don’t you?
As one of today’s leading historians and geopolitical thinkers, Niall Ferguson brings exceptional depth and clarity to conversations about global strategy, economic power, and international conflict. His ability to connect history with current events makes him an especially valuable speaker for corporate audiences, leadership forums, and policy-focused conferences seeking insight into today’s rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape. To learn more about hosting Niall Ferguson at your next event, contact WWSG.
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