Published: 12:41 AM, 18 June 2026
What I Think When I Think About Football
Dr. Kanan Purkayastha
In 2022 when Argentina defeated France in Lusail, Qatar, approximately quarter of population of the planet were watching the game. This indicates the popularity of the game. Now, with the World Cup on North American soil for the first time in 32 years, FIFA and its president, Gianni Infantino, have turned that popularity into something many fans say they never wanted. In fact, World Cup is unaffordable for many to attend the game. For most fans, attending the World Cup require a thousand-dollar ticket, four-hundred-dollar flight and also a costly hotel room that in many cities have doubled or tripled in price. Parking at some host stadium was running as high as one hundred seventy-five dollars per car.
On the other hand, host cities warned they may not recover the hundreds of millions they are spending on security and infrastructure, even as FIFA is expected to generate eleven billion dollars in revenue from the tournament. FIFA dismissed the criticism, as FIFA President Infantino said, as reported by the Newsweek that ‘we have to look at the market-we are in the market in which entertainment is the most developed in the world.’ Infantino also added that ‘In the US, it is permitted to resell tickets as well, so one can sell tickets at the price which is too low, these tickets will be resold at a much higher price.’ However, the general criticism is that ‘what’s the point of hosting the World Cup there if the communities that usually attend soccer games are being excluded?’
Other criticism that spur this year is that Jorge Pinto, the Colombian coach, who mentioned in an interview with Newsweek that ‘players are arriving with too many games on their legs, there is very little time to prepare, the temperatures will be intense and having the tournament spread across three countries only adds to the physical and logistical demands on teams trying to compete at the highest level.’ It has been suggested that ‘for FIFA, it is not only a sport anymore, but also entertainment, fashion, lifestyle and digital culture.’
Besides all financial, commercial and management issue, I look for some philosophy of life from football as a game. In the article On the Ball, Burnett quotes Don DeLlilo, ‘The football knew that this is a football game. It knew that it was the centre of the game, it was aware of its own footballness.’ It is in fact a solid plastic object with some air in it, but its size and weight have to be in compliance with rules of the game. It appears in spectators’ eye that the ball is alive, it feels like it has a life of its own. France player Zidane once commented that he remembers one moment when he received the ball and he knew exactly what was going to happen. Zidane knew and the ball knew that he would score before the ball had even touched his foot. Ball and player seem to possess a co-intelligence.
Considering the co-intelligence perspective, I am thinking of Austrian-German philosopher Edmund Husserl who established the school of phenomenology. Husserl’s philosophy offers a profound framework for understanding the lived experience of football. From Husserl’s philosophy we get a distinction between the physical body as an object and the lived, experienced body. In football, a player does not stop play calculate the angle of a pass, rather their body acts spontaneously through a pre-reflective way. Muscle memory and spatial awareness allow the body to intuitively navigate the pitch. I draw some idea here from Husserl’s passive synthesis, retention and protention. Passive synthesis explains how players operate without needing constant active thought. A player’s anticipation of where an opponent or teammate will move is rooted in what Husserl called retention, this means holding the immediate past in mind and also expecting the immediate future, which is known as protention. According to Husserl, this continuous flow of time and perception explains how players anticipate the game before it happens. From Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian meditations, we know how one perceives the other and relate to other conscious beings. This leads to the idea of intersubjective duelling. Players constantly try to enter the mind of their opponent and understand their intention and predicting the action. It is the flow states of the play that is matter.
We can go further with Philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a book in 1974 ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’ The book is about the problem of subjective consciousness. This leads to Philosopher David Chalmer’s idea of panpsychism. According to this philosophical idea consciousness is not something unique to complex brains, but a fundamental built-in feature of all matter in the universe. This means that everything-even a tiny particle like an electron-has basic level of experience. This suggests that even when football lie un-kicked on the floor, they still have the potential for movement and inviting one ‘come on, take me out, play with me.’ The philosophical position here is that we animate the ball without life and in animating the ball we animate ourselves, make ourselves feel alive with a particularly intense sense of aliveness. I am aware of the combination problem of panpsychism. The combination problem is the problem of how precisely the fundamental conscious minds come to compose, constitute or give rise to some further additional conscious mind.
In short, Football is a game that compels and delights us. It also exasperates and disgusts us. This reaction revolves around space, time, passion, reason, aesthetics, morals and politics. Space and time dominate our present. Both players and spectators fully submit to the present, awaiting moment by moment and future open in front of us, which is uncertain but happen at a moment. When I think about football, besides all financial and management issue, I think how players knowingly or unknowingly following Husserl’s philosophy and bracketing out the distractions of the outside world and immersing themselves entirely in the present struggle of the match. This definitely teaches us various lessons for our life.
Dr. Kanan Purkayastha is a
UK-based academic who
writes on science, philosophy
and education.
