Anthems, flags and how football borrowed the rituals of the state

Borrowed ceremony

Anthems, flags and formal line-ups come from state and military tradition rather than from anything the sport developed for itself. Attaching them to a football match declares that the contest represents something larger than the twenty-two people on the pitch. That declaration is the entire function of the ritual, and it works whether or not anybody present finds the ceremony moving.

Club football has no equivalent, which is why a club match feels like a private argument and an international feels like a public one. The difference is created almost entirely by the fifteen minutes before kick-off rather than by anything in the match itself.

What the ritual does to the players

Standing in a line while an anthem plays is an unusual experience that has no counterpart in ordinary professional life. It marks a boundary, separating the individual as an employee from the individual as a representative, which is a genuine change in role. Players describe the transition in terms that suggest it is felt rather than performed, whatever the surrounding commercial apparatus.

That is why gestures made during anthems carry so much weight and generate a reaction out of all proportion to the few seconds they occupy. A ritual with real force is also a ritual with real capacity to be used for something other than its intended purpose, and everybody involved understands that.

Countries relate to it differently

The same ceremony means different things depending on how recently a country established itself and how contested its symbols remain. In some places the anthem is uncomplicated civic furniture, and in others it carries an argument that is still very much alive. Football provides one of the few regular occasions when those symbols are performed in front of a large and diverse audience.

That makes the pre-match ceremony a site of politics whether or not anybody involved wants it to be one. Governing bodies attempt to keep politics out of the sport while running a ritual that is politics in its purest form.

The crowd's part

Supporters at international matches use flags, colours and song in ways that borrow from both civic ceremony and club terrace culture. The combination produces a distinctive atmosphere, more formal than a club crowd at the start and often less sustained through the match. Because international crowds assemble only occasionally, they lack the accumulated repertoire that a club crowd builds up through weekly repetition over many years.

They compensate with volume and with symbols, which is why an international crowd looks more spectacular and frequently sounds less coherent. The two crowd cultures are related but distinct, and many people belong to both without noticing the difference.

Why the ceremony has proved impossible to reduce

Every proposal to shorten pre-match formalities meets resistance, because the ceremony is what distinguishes the fixture from an ordinary match. Removing it would leave an international game looking like a friendly between two unusually good club sides. The associations therefore protect the ritual carefully, since it is the mechanism that makes their competition feel more significant than club football.

Broadcasters protect it too, because it supplies a reliable emotional opening that requires no explanation to a new viewer. A convention with that many interested defenders is not going to be simplified, whatever the arguments about time and however crowded the schedule becomes.