2026 Calendar - Football Is Life

Football is Life

A Universal Story of Beauty and Belonging

In urban centers and tiny villages, amid plains, deserts, forests, rainforests, coastal areas and any other habitat on our spinning sphere, football found a formidable foothold. “Is there any cultural practice more global than football?” author David Goldblatt asks at the outset of The Ball Is Round: The Global History of Soccer.

Well, is there?

Birth, death, taxes—all are imbued with what we might call universality, but as Goldblatt points out, differing rituals greet these occasions from place to place. Though styles of play can vary based on culture, history, innovation, daring, success and failure, commonality lies in the rules and rudiments of the game, which are uniform across six of seven continents. 

Its greatest event, the FIFA World Cup, returns in 2026, and the culture that surrounds the everyday game will rush anew into our collective conscious. Before and during play, football’s history, soundtracks, technical advancements and more will dominate conversations both on and off the pitch. To seek connective threads among disparate cultures is to find them in this game that feels bigger than a game. As is life, football is hope, excitement, anguish and disappointment. It is preparation and improvisation. It is learning and applying that learning. 

Even earlier—before we walk, before we talk, before we leave the womb—we kick. 

This beautiful game awaits us.

Do we find football, or does it find us? Probably both. It’s passed down from parents, it’s shared with siblings, it connects to friends. All this occurs before our experience is formalized into something requiring a kit and boots, a pitch, four vertical posts and two crossbars and the ball. The fervor spills into cultures around the world in football-centric rites and rituals: It’s found in jerseys worn year-round; in giant murals that celebrate the game’s finest practitioners; in the game-day flags, hats, noisemakers. Football fandom isn’t about restraint. Among all social rituals, this one is meant to be celebrated radiantly. It’s a melted crayon box of expression.

At the outset, though, football requires the development of that invisible string that ties one’s foot to the ball, a counterintuitive practice that makes no use of those thumbs that distinguish our species.

Math on stages big and small

Football possesses its own sacred geometry. Take the ball itself, a sphere, with all the perfection that connotes. The game spans a flat plane where arcs and angles feel as mystical as mathematical. Players plot these lines and parabolas, sometimes while moving 20 mph (32 kph). 

The World Cup awakens every four years—with the cicada-like hum of the plastic horns known as vuvuzelas that gained fame during the 2010 tournament in South Africa—and has for nearly a century. Eighty nations have vied for 22 World Cups, not quite half the countries of the world. 

Football’s global scale speaks to its nearly ubiquitous appeal. Consider the 2026 Men’s World Cup, when 48 teams—upped for the first time from 32—will compete in 16 cities across Mexico, the United States and Canada. This follows the 2022 event with Qatar as the first Arab host country. The event’s name is not a misnomer.  With apologies to American baseball and its World Series, the Cup truly belongs to the world.

That’s the cultural phenomenon in its grandest setting. But football didn’t reach global renown because of this tournament. Rather, the game flourishes for its ability to function in nearly any setting. Two traffic cones, fence posts, a couple of trash cans, chalk marks on the side of a house: The makings of a roughshod goal are always at hand. 

Equipment is minimal. Boots and shin guards offer a degree of comfort and protection. But in towns around the world, barefoot children chase a ball or, absent financial resources, duct tape around a wad of fabric. Whatever the setting, the ball has a magnetic pull. Soccer in the sand will set one’s calf muscles screaming, yet beaches everywhere offer ample space for impromptu play. Two young friends in Morocco can do drills in a nook by their home. Concrete and blacktop aren’t optimal for the game, yet footballs skitter across these surfaces just the same as in a 1930s photo from London, where kids prepare to play outside Lyons, a purveyor of pastries and tea. 

Heroes, villains and rituals

Style quickly finds its way into the experience. No brand or garment can communicate something about the self the way a football jersey does. A jersey can indicate friend or foe. More basically, it can cross over the game’s tribalism and overcome any barrier of language. The jerseys, in this sense, are a friendly flag: They signal an affinity for a particular club or country but also affection for the game at-large. En masse they are radiant, mostly primary colors with the brightest of secondary colors also invited. Football is not for muted earth tones. These garments are not camouflage for wallflowers. They are the plumage of exotic birds. 

From professional players youths form allegiances, defined by proximity, nationality or some other factor. And they learn the intricacies of rivalry—that heroes and villains wear the bright colors they know so well. On the pitch heroism and villainy are often painted in shades of gray. Football allowed the Argentinian Diego Maradona, who hoisted the World Cup trophy in 1986, to become El Pibe de Oro, or the Golden Boy, whose short and stocky build accommodated twists and turns and advanced ball handling that made him one of the greatest players of the 20th century. His two World Cup goals versus England speak to the breadth of his persona, one a dazzling display of skill as he dribbled past England’s helpless defenders for a goal that appeared impossible. The other is just as famous, or perhaps infamous. It felt like divine intervention as his fist, rather than his feet, played the part of scorer, undetected by the game’s officials. 

Football certainly plays host to hopes and prayers. Yet even if prayers go unanswered as we hope, we use the game as a form of fellowship and communion, as evidenced by two Iraqi girls sitting together after play. One can do drills alone, but add a second person and it starts to take shape as a familiar dance that feels like football. This engagement and interactivity nourish, whether it’s two friends passing back and forth or a nation with high hopes that an impending World Cup will be its year. 

The encircled joining of hands before players take the pitch spirals like the Caracol, the snaillike swirl the Maya regarded as sacred. Like that shape, football feels like a series of spirals, of near repetitions where ritual and familiarity exist but with slow incremental change. So the sun rises, and somewhere kids gather to kick a ball around. The same ritual takes place at dusk. Good luck estimating how many times this has been repeated. 

It’s no different than steps taken, meals eaten, air breathed. Because here, there and everywhere, football is life.