When you leaf through the press and listen to the radio, you immediately notice that there is one dominant topic: soccer and the soccer league. This sport has become a universal event that unites people all over the world across national borders, with the same feelings, with identical hopes, fears, passions and joys. All of this reveals to us that we are facing a genuinely human phenomenon. The question spontaneously arises as to why this game exerts such fascination. The pessimist will answer that it is one more repetition of what was already experienced in ancient Rome: bread and circuses; panem et circenses.

But even if we accepted this answer, we would have to ask ourselves: and what accounts for such fascination, which leads people to place the game alongside bread, and to give it the same importance?

Returning again to ancient Rome, we could answer this question by saying that the cry demanding “bread and games” was the expression of the desire for a paradisiacal life. In this sense, the game presents itself as a kind of return to the first home, to paradise; as an escape from everyday existence, with its enslaving harshness.

Yet the game has, especially in children, a different meaning: it is training for life.

In my judgment, the fascination with soccer consists, essentially, in the fact that it knows how to unite these two meanings convincingly: it helps people to discipline themselves and teaches them to work together with others within a team, showing them how they can face others in a noble way.

As they watch it, people identify with that game, making that spirit of cooperation and fair confrontation with others their own.

Of course, the gloomy seriousness of money, joined to commercial interests, can ruin all of this.

Thinking carefully about all this, the possibility arises of learning to live with the spirit of the game, because human freedom is also nourished by rules and self-discipline.

In any case, the sight of a world that vibrates with the game should serve us for something more than mere entertainment, because if we went to the bottom of the matter, the game could show us a new way of understanding life.

Author: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI)