Football and Greek Tragedy: The Parallels

Maracanazo: Footie Catharsis.

In many ways, footie represents the quintessential human drama. The interplay of good and evil, the pursuit of cohesion and of perfection, the incessant tests of virtues, such as sacrifice and honor, and the culmintation of these forces in either the unbridled joy of a happy ending, experienced by the victors, or the searing sorrow of loss, endured by the losers.

Football makes classical Greek tragedy accessible to the masses. The games, as the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, are cathartic, in that they provide for the cleansing of the soul in their combination of fear (of failure) and of pity (for both the losing players and their fans). Likewise, the gripping action of the matches, as with the plot action in these tragedies, transports the audience to a place where the reality of their inconsequential for two hours. The often unjust outcomes in footie match, due to the typically margin of victory, also means that teams with otherwise obvious discrepancies in ability always have a chance to win.

Thus, football closely approximates the struggle of forces explored in Greek tragedy, and so the deeply resonant and purposeful audience experience in those tragedies is replicated in the games. An apt example is the 1950 World Cup final, in which Brazil, the top, technically unmatched side in the tournament, was thwarted in the last minutes of the match by Uruguay, in front of a crowd of 200,000 in Rio de Janeiro. After the match, the CBF forswore white jerseys, favoring a change to yellow ones; indeed, introspection and the personal evolution it yields are the unavoidable consequences of tragedy.

In these ways, football, just as tragedy, has its power in the message it communicates about struggling, surviving, and sometimes emerging victorious, in the context of imperfect human nature.