Going to the football has been one of the rites of passage in my life. As a boy, I went with my dad and my brother to watch my beloved Luton Town. It was where we shouted, laughed, cheered and, more often than not, came home mildly disappointed.
As I got older, football became something I did with friends, a Saturday built around the game, but never just about the game. A place to talk, to share and to celebrate. Now, as a parent, I find myself doing what my father did before me, taking my own boys along and watching them learn the strange, hopeful, occasionally punishing rhythm of supporting a team.
I’ve never been someone who watches much football on TV. For me, the pull has always been the people I’m with and the chance to be together, away from work, school runs, phones, stress and all the small pressures that build over a week. Sport gives people permission to shout, sing, jump up and down, talk nonsense for a couple of hours and, on a good day, believe everything might still turn out well.
That feeling is not unique to football, or to the UK. Across the world, sport has long given people somewhere to belong and be part of something larger than themselves. But in many places, elite sport has drifted further from the people and communities that built it. Tickets have become too expensive for many families, clubs and competitions have been drawn deeper into the machinery of money, and too many stadiums still echo with the racism, sexism and homophobia that should have been left far behind.
So it is no surprise that many people are looking to grassroots clubs, community teams and local sporting groups instead, not just because they are more affordable, but because they often feel closer to what they were looking for in the first place. They are places where volunteers hold everything together, children can get near the action, newcomers can find a way in, and people can truly belong to a club.
Elite sport has drifted from the communities that built it. So it is no surprise that many are looking to grassroots clubs
In the new issue of Positive News magazine, we look at that shift through football, community and the people rebuilding sport from the ground up. We meet those using the game to support physical health, mental wellbeing and social connection, and we see how minority communities are not simply being invited in at the edges, but helping shape what sport can become.
As the World Cup continues amid some controversy in North America, it is worth remembering that football is not only about rivalries and tribalism. Like so many of the stories – from Syria to Italy to Brazil – that you will read in this issue, it is also about what happens when communities come together and build something of their own.
Again and again, the most meaningful change begins close to home – on a pitch, in a street, around a table – among people who know that community is something made together.
Cover photograph: Sam Bush
