'Domain'

The other day I was listening to a podcast interview with Tom Holland—not the Spiderman actor, but the English historian. He's the author of Dominion , among other books, a fascinating and exhaustive history of Christianity from its birth to the present day, which I read with great interest this summer. At the end of the conversation, they asked him: "What do you think we're not talking about enough?" And he replied: "Have you talked about the cultural significance and importance of sport?" "No," they replied. And he continued: “I say this because I recently realized that the two moments in which I've had the most powerful sense of life's fulfillment this year have been sporting events (among them, the Champions League quarterfinals between Aston Villa and PSG). I'm just one person, but among millions of people, perhaps billions, who share experiences like these. It's obvious that sport is part of a very vast, global, industrialized, enormous construct . But the way it's evolved, and the fact that we suddenly take it for granted, has struck me. It's certainly a very strange phenomenon. Perhaps that's what you should talk about more.”

How did you go from a local baseball game to watching the same match in La Plata or Mataró?

Tom Holland is not only a widely read historian in Great Britain and the United States, but, along with Dominic Sandbrook, he hosts The Rest Is History , which must be the most popular history podcast in the world. His two great passions, and main areas of research, classical culture and the history of the Christian religion, make his surprise at the cultural dimension that football has acquired highly contagious. How did the leap from a local ball game, codified by the London Football Association in 1863, into a global phenomenon that brings together young and old around a television to watch the same match, a classic, for example, in a neighborhood bar in Addis Ababa, Taipei, La Plata, or Mataró? How is it that we have ceased to be surprised by this game, played in this way, with this very peculiar and intricate combination of the best and worst that we human beings are capable of? There's the game, of course, the excitement, the childhood dreams, the shared memories with loved ones; there's the talent and sacrifices of elite sport, the skill and elegance alongside violence, the spectacle, the game of identities, the base passions, the politics, the business, the corruption, the attempts to manipulate public opinion... But above all, there's the attention we pay to it. Why, of all the things that call it, has it ended up being football that has managed to unite it around itself?