What Makes Football So Great?

For many people, the sport of football can be a hard one to get into. “It’s not the same” many will cry, having fallen out of love with the huge amounts of money swirling around the top clubs. However, the sport itself hasn’t changed – it still finds a way of bringing together millions of people every single weekend to cheer on their respective teams. For many, football gives them a sense of belonging that they simply don’t have or cannot find elsewhere.

My Thoughts On Football

Being a passionate football player, supporter or anything else that you fancy is the pinnacle of sporting enjoyment for so many – it’s the foundation of many friendships. There are people who literally never have to buy a meal again in their lives, despite being millionaires, because they showed honor and loyalty to a specific football club. They are legends within that local area, and fans across the world that support that team will recognize them across the globe – few other sports give you this same incredible array of emotions.

What makes football so great to watch or play as a sport, though, is the fact that stats mean very little. Whilst it’s nice to know just how good – or bad – a team or player is playing, it’s not definitive. It’s massively subjective – for example, a player could have an incredible pass completion ratio on a stats board. They might just spend the game playing the safe pass, though!

It’s the fact that so many variables come into play across 90 minutes – the fact that the team is relying on up to 14 members of the team to play to their best – that make it so unique to other sports. Whilst with baseball and similar sports the metrics are far more predictable and can therefore be used more empirically, with football it simply does not work.

How else can you explain a team such as Atletico Madrid winning the hardest league championship there is in the world? They overcame two of the biggest clubs in the world over 38 games, despite having a budget that was a fraction of the other team. Whilst the biggest and richest teams tend to enjoy prolonged footballing success, it’s been shown ever since the sport started that the underdogs can achieve something special if they are able to put together the right team performance and style.

Other sports are literally bought – it just takes a whole load of money to get the team to perform at their max. With football, though, a team worth hundreds of millions could win absolutely nothing – what other industry is so awash with money, yet manages to make it so comparatively worthless?
It’s one of the great parts of the sport – despite the suits trying to take the love out of the game for the rest of us with money and guarantees of success, the magic of the game forbids it!

No other sport is so balanced and offers the chance for the truly incredibly to take place as often as football does – every week, heroes and villains are born. These tags can last for minutes, weeks, years…some even last until today and will do for many years to come.


The legends that the sport habitually creates is the product of making thousands of people happy at any one time – very little on this planet creates such a cult of community and passion and this is why, for many, football is the only sport that really matters!