The Champions League final between Manchester City and Inter Milan on Saturday 10 June is sure to be a global event. Looking back, the finals of the past few years have drawn 160 million viewers worldwide (on par with the Super Bowl, which however averages 100 million in the United States alone), an impressive number that pales in comparison anyway with 1.5 billion people watching Argentina triumph in the 2022 FIFA World Cup finals, figures that make it the most watched sporting event on the planet. Meanwhile, find out who will win Serie A? Scudetto 23/24 favorites and betting odds are already in this guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14jizCc4D4SaW3T4faFmv7Ms6QG_wHlYb_IqKtPpp5KQ/edit.
In this way, football confirms itself as the most popular sport in the world, the most popular, capable of uniting the planet. But why football and not other sports?
History and tradition
When we try to explain success, a prerequisite must be made: in addition to all the characteristics that explain its popularity, there is an intangible parameter that makes the difference between a great product/show and a genuine one. mass phenomenon, i.e. time. Football as a sport (but this is a discourse that can be applied to any wildly popular success, from Despacito in music to Harry Potter in literature, to name two distant examples) has been able to capture the "zeitgeist", as Hegel would say: to come into right time and right place; it is an almost mystical justification that nevertheless has a great effect in distinguishing between what becomes customary and what remains a backward step, although valued and perhaps of similar characteristics. Especially after the world wars, football became one of the symbols of the European renaissance due to its popular and strongly territorial nature, which, pitting cities and nations against each other, presented itself as an unconscious exorcism of war presented through an inoffensive game. If this can explain the explosion of football's popularity, then the cult of tradition partly explains its persistence: the passion is passed down from generation to generation through initiation rites between parents and children (I still vividly remember the first time my father took me to the stadium, and I was 5 years old, ed. note). Today, the major league's conquest of new markets, such as Africa and Asia, comes primarily from market ideas and investments.
Accessibility and "democracy"
One of the strengths of soccer is its ease of play: there is no need for special equipment (such as in tennis or golf) or a regular playing field, just a ball (or anything resembling a ball) and two zones divided as doors (two Christmas trees, two slippers, neighbor's door). The very rules of the game of football, reduced to the basics, are actually very simple, with no particularly codified games that allow everyone to try their hand at it. Furthermore, it is a sport where physical structure is relative: tall, short, hardy, agile or even skittish people can be equally useful in a team, making it a truly "democratic" sport in that sense.
Connection with the territory and social redemption
We mentioned the territorial dimension of football, which, unlike typical American sports franchises, is based on belonging to a city or a nation. If it is true that fandom has become globalized and less geographically related today, on the other hand, local fandom still prevails, especially for those 99% of teams that do not have an international dimension. The identification of the fan and his hometown team takes us back to early twentieth-century England and the connection between working-class communities and football teams that still obscures English rivalries of deep political and social significance (a perfect example being the Glasgow derby between Irish Catholic immigrants with " Celtic" and Protestant Scottish natives from "Rangers"); in this context, football was seen as social redemption and the players were modern heroes with whom the workers identified, a vision we find at different times almost all over the world (Italy during the economic boom, South America today).
Faith and rituals
The social importance of football means that scientists from even very different social fields are interested in it; the most famous of all is Desmond Morris, zoologist and ethologist, author of the famous "Naked Ape" and the book "Football Tribe", in which he explores the pseudo-religious and tribal aspects of football, thus explaining his unique abilities. generate emotions and its success, even economic. Soccer would be more widespread because it manages to better replicate the functioning of tribal hunting, where the prey is the door and the hunter-players cooperate by applying ancestral skills such as aiming, speed, agility in chase-like situations, arrow shot, surroundings.
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