The Revd Rob Glenny chats about the commonalities between the beautiful game and churchgoing - from communal singing and being part of something bigger to intergenerational attendees. He concludes: "It's not really about faith, it's really about glory."
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"It's really about glory"
The Revd Rob Glenny
Thank you for having me. I'm not sure I'd make the analogy with faith, but I do think there is something that's for a number of things that are very similar about attending football matches as attending church and some positive things to be said about both.
For example, there are not many places in our society where you get genuinely intergenerational gatherings of people, you know, very young children through to the very elderly. But at both the churches I lead and at the grounds I attend, there is a steady stream of people from tiny babies in slings through to 90-year-olds who have been watching the same team or coming to the same parish for a great number of years.
Perhaps to give a second example, not many places these days where you have a lot of communal singing. Perhaps at a pop concert, but you know, at sporting events and in church and the pop concert, course, unlikely to attract as wide a generational gap as you might get at football to see, so yes, a chance to sing together as well.
Phil Mercer
I have to say, the football matches I've been in, the singing is a slightly different- has a different tone and edge to it than you might find in a church!
Rob
Well, the language might be different, but it's amazing how often the tunes are borrowed, one from the other. I'm sure you'll have heard a football tune being sung or a chant on a terrace to something like Lord of the Dance.
Of course, the Cup final famously every year has Abide With Me, has done for a long time, sung at the beginning of it. So even that sense of there being an actual more formal link between the music and the tunes that are in our heads and what gets sung in various environments is perhaps actually greater and stronger than we perhaps imagine it to be.
Phil
Okay, so we've got some good connections, good things that sort of connect the two together. Tell me about your love of football then. Where did that start?
Rob
I think it's one of those things that I just always had. I'm a big sport fan. I think lots of, lots of people will get that. It's just one of those things that you get exposed to at a young age and love and is a passion.
I've been following my football team and at the risk of losing all of your viewers in one go, that's Wycombe Wanderers. That's right. For well over 30 years. So it's, it's been a long-term project even in my relative youth as I am as a priest.
Phil
Yeah, okay. I mean, that's fair. So what do you get out of that then? Is it the camaraderie? Yeah, what is it that football delivers for you?
Rob
Okay, well, I think there's several things there.
One is it gives you a chance to feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself. I think lots of us long for that feeling, that sense that our identity is found in a community and isn't just entirely reliant on what we create for ourselves.
Secondly, I'm relatively unusual, I think, in that I was going to football on my own from a reasonably young age, and I go with my son, who's a season ticket holder now. And I used to go home and away on the coach and particularly at away games, when you're supporting a, you know, not hugely well supported side, you see the same faces week after week making ridiculous pilgrimages all over the country. I mean, yes, I won't say anything offensive about the places I've been to, but there are lots of grounds that you wouldn't otherwise probably be visiting that part of the country on a Saturday with a free day ahead of you.
And what you get out of that is, you know, it's just time spent with other people you wouldn't necessarily come across. And I've cultivated and developed and now value a huge range of friendships with people who I'd have never come across in any other circumstances, and we're drawn together by a shared passion.
And of course, on those long journeys, there's nothing else to do except just to sit and chat and to get to know people and you can talk about the game. But eventually that conversation branches out into other parts of life.
I'll tell you, was watching a game online the other day, and my son was watching with me, and the camera panned to the crowd, and we saw the people we usually sit next to and he said, "There's our seats!" And I said "There they are, you can see our friends!" And he said "What's that man's name?" I said "I don't know," he said "But you always talk to him!"
You know, that's the glory of being able to be part of a crowd, you know, it's immediate connection with that with a group of people.
Phil
I must ask, does the dog collar stay on when you're there or does it come off?
Rob
No, but a number of people know that I'm a priest, and one friendship I've made has resulted in- one person who I've been getting to know over a long time, and when I took this job, when I was interviewed for this job, I said, if I get this job, you have to come to Midnight Mass this year. And she did! And that was a marvelous moment in both my lives.
Phil
When the team is not doing so well is the temptation to turn to them, that's where maybe the combination of having a faith and also having a football team, maybe they sort of begin to meet in the middle there somewhere?
Rob
Absolutely. I think, so there's things to say about that.
One, sport in general, football in particular, one of the great virtues of sport is it teaches us to be in conflict with other people without being violent. So there are groups of supports on the other side of the ground who want a different outcome, who are trying to influence the referee a different way, whose experience of their afternoon is a zero sum game with mine.
But it doesn't mean that we end up throwing punches at each other. It means we have a shared passion that we gather in the same place around. And then when you meet those same supporters at a service station a few months later or what have you, you have a great chat about the game. So I think that's one thing to be said about it.
And the second, which I think you put your finger on there, this is true of Church communities as well as football communities, particularly if you support a lower league team. I mean, who wants to support someone who wins every week? There's no fun in that.
What being part of those communities teaches you together is how to experience disappointment, as well as experience joy, and find it's not the end of the world, and there are still people around you.
There aren't too many places where we go to lament together. But walking out the ground when you've just lost four nil is one of those times.
There might be bit of anger and a bit of frustration, but mostly it's people processing a disappointment together and then learning how to do that safely. You know, we do that in church together. It's a really significant learning behavior for humans to be able to get their heads around.
Phil
I wonder if there's anything in the tangible nature that when you support a football team, they're physically in front of you, there's a success or there's a failure or whatever the result, there is a result of one kind or another. When you go into a church, there's something slightly less tangible maybe about it, and that's a real faith, isn't it? Because they're physically not in front of you.
Rob
Yes, that's right. You don't believe in Jack Grimmer at right back as the way one believes in Jesus for sure.
Here's an intangible thing they share in common - you'll remember the great Danny Blanchflower, the Tottenham captain, and his famous quote that he used to be up at White Hart Lane, the game is about glory. And what that means to me, and perhaps the Tottenham fans as well, I don't know, is it's more than about just utility. Actually, it's more than about just simply winning and losing.
The moments you remember as a football fan are that last-minute winner when everyone's going wild, or the time you get promotion in that for the first time in 20 years or something of that nature. That is about feeling something that is intangible that you can't replicate. You can't just snap your fingers and get it at any other point in your life. At its absolute best moments, that is what happens on a Sunday morning in a church or on Sunday evening.
If you could create that for yourself on your own, you would, but you can't. It's something you can only get by those kind of, as you say, intangible moments of gathering when it feels like you've just become more truly alive than you ever could before. So I think that is the connection point. Rather than faith, it's really about glory.