As a woman and a professor of philosophy, I have seen football always very differently. I had poor knowledge of tactical systems, but I enjoyed from all my heart the great spectacle from the peach with emotion. If a Nobel winner, Camus, acknowledged that everything he knew about ethics was learned from football, why wouldn’t we recognize that it happened the same for ourselves, as the round ball equipped our mind with a playful sense of fairness, rational thinking, and moral altruism? Being in the stadium made me though that supporters are nothing like the masses embracing the false sense of democracy, as Nietzsche argued reading Schiller’s reflections on the raise of the choir on the stage of a tragedy. Fans belong to a voluntary and passionate social contract. The values of the football club they support make them equal in front of the other, be it woman or man, adult, or child. So, a democrat means being capable of loving all those who share the same values with you and respecting all those who have different commitments and perspectives on a competitive world that they all share together.
As a little one, I grew up watching France’s international competitions: for my father, football was a blue spectacle with Zizou’s melancholy, a glacial look, even when trophies were breaking any record. Consequently, I was educated with the conviction that passions should always be controlled by reason, regardless of the triumphs or the losses you might face.
In time, I found out the opposite of the Cartesian, methodical game: it was British, and this pedigree imposed quite a different Weltanschauung. Football was part of the DNA of a nation: kids were filling the stadiums; the game was part of their canonical education; it was no shame to argue that the sense of citizenship and the taste for loyalty started on the grass. Football was Bildung, there was no doubt. The sense of competition was learned empirically. Football was, as Locke would put it, sensation, always more powerful than reflection. I recall reading the book written by one of Liverpool’s greatest fans, Simon Critchley, What about football? It is nonsense to ask a player what he was thinking when he scored. It is pure instinct, phenomenology, experience. But to enjoy this contingency occasioned by a game, you must tailor multiple scenarios of possible worlds engaging reason and imagination in different plans to play as good as possible. I learned from English football that the fever of the stadiums perfectly describes the Pascalian logic of the heart and that in this sport you always have a twelfth player: in my case, the force of Anfield, the collective consciousness of those loyal to the club. That’s how, in time, I started to understand football from Zizou’s melancholy to Klopp’s smile, which was by far highly temperamental and yet remained one of the few examples of perfect elegance from this sport. It is not relevant here why I embraced Liverpool: it was not only a matter of choice, but also of empathy.
What had an impact from the world of English soccer was the fact that I learned three philosophical lessons. The first one is that virtues will always help you to act correctly whenever destiny makes something unpredictable happen. Machiavelli was right: virtue will help you defeat Fortuna. And yet, this is not enough to think about football in terms of political realism only.
The second one is that your rival will always change, so you have to be prepared not only for anything, but also for anyone.