Abstract

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that soccer today has become a replacement for religion, not only as a transcendent deed but also as a real fact. The planet-wide scope that soccer has achieved in recent years leads us to believe that contemporary man has made soccer teams his object of worship, beliefs and yearning for happiness, appropriating terms that used to have exclusively religious semantics. Another purpose of this study is to report on the existence, within this field, of an entire set of symbols and rites more common to a sacred language than to the profane language of soccer. To find our results, we use a hermeneutic methodology grounded upon the analysis of secondary sources. We shall try to demonstrate how faith, one of the main features upon which religion is upheld, has changed its object of worship. That is, it has gone from being viewed as a metaphysical, transcendent concept to being reduced to and placed within an earthly human, or a group of human beings, namely soccer teams.