Football is a team sport that entertains billions of fans and fans. Ninety minutes, 22 players, one ball and one scoreboard. Fun and leisure from Monday to Sunday. However, anyone who has ever followed a decisive match knows that there is much more at stake.
Football is an extraordinary laboratory of human passions. In it we find intense joys, deep sadness, as well as fears and hopes that resist until the final whistle. We also find manifest desires in the repeated shouts of the euphoric crowd and more cautious desires, explained in the lives of YouTubers. Few human experiences clarify precious philosophical notions with such acuity. From Spinoza and Kant.
For Spinoza, the fundamental affects that organize our emotional life are joy and sadness.
Joy corresponds to a passage to a state of greater power of one’s being. It is a gain of power to act. And excited for life. Sadness is its opposite. Dwarfing. Loss of tone. Relentless broaching.
In football, joy and sadness are preceded by two emotions: hope and fear. These form an inseparable pair. In hope there is a gain in power in the face of the expectation of a desired but ignored occurrence. The fear is a loss of power, also resulting from an occurrence that was only imagined, but unwanted. And where does football come into this story?
Watch a fan. When his team scores a goal, he experiences an explosion of joy. Your ability to act, dream and celebrate seems to expand. The world becomes lighter. On the other hand, when the opponent scores, sadness appears. The fan feels diminished, dejected, as if part of their energy has been taken away.
Even more interesting is what happens before the game. The fan oscillates between hope and fear. Expect victory, imagine the cup, plan celebrations. But he also fears defeat, failure and frustration. Football confirms Espinosa as a textbook example: we do not wait without fearing nor do we fear without retaining some hope.
Football also allows us to reflect on the distinction between desire and will proposed by Kant. Desire is linked to the inclinations, impulses and satisfactions we seek. The will, in turn, is the rational faculty of determining our actions according to principles that we recognize as correct.
A fan wishes and cheers for his team to win. This desire is born from a passion, from an emotional history. At the same time, he can recognize that an irregular goal must be disallowed, even at the expense of his team. In this case, he expresses his will, guided by reason and justice.
For Kant, the moral value of an action is not in satisfying desires, but in acting in accordance with what reason recognizes as duty. Victory of the will over any desiring impulse.
Perhaps this is the great philosophical richness of football. It is not reduced to a spectacle or confrontation of physical skills. It is also a mirror of the human condition.
Like other sports, it doesn’t just allow you to win or lose. It reveals, in moments of great intensity, how each of us allows ourselves to be affected. In joy, sadness, fear, hope, desire. Always inviting us to understand ourselves better and, thus, free ourselves from the grip of sad passions that ruin life.
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