Soccer and HopeRead Time 9 min

According to FIFA, the organization that sponsors the World Cup, the 2022 final in Qatar, when Argentina beat France, had 1.5 billion viewers. In comparison, Super Bowl LVI had less than 200 million viewers worldwide.

Full disclosure: I love soccer. Watching Liverpool with my sons is my idea of a great morning, so those numbers don’t surprise me. They do cause me to wonder though. Why has the beautiful sport not taken off more in America? Why do we choose to spend three hours and 12 minutes on average watching 60 minutes of play in football when we can watch 90 to 100 minutes of play in soccer in under two hours? People tell me soccer is boring. There may only be one or two goals a game. But here’s what they are missing: soccer is a game of hope.

Every time possession changes from one team to the other, which is 100 to 200 times a game, there is renewed hope. Maybe this time it will end in a goal. It’s this hope, this constant anticipation of scoring, that makes soccer such fun.

“Maybe,” I said to my son after he shared these statistics with me, “Americans don’t have as much hope as the rest of the world.”

It was an off-the-cuff statement with no research to back it up but it got me thinking about hope in general and the importance of it. The hope one experiences while watching a sporting event, whether it’s the constant hope of soccer or the less regular hope of football, is different from the theological virtue of hope but there are similarities.

St. Thomas Aquinas describes two types of hope: the passion of hope and the theological virtue of hope. The passion of hope involves something difficult being accomplished by yourself or others. It’s the soccer goal that finally happens after 80 minutes of play or the touchdown on fourth down. God does not factor into this hope. It comes from the efforts of the people playing the game.

The theological virtue of hope is focusing on something greater that is only achieved with the help of God. This hope makes us “adhere to God as the source whence we derive perfect goodness.” (Summa Theologiae, II-II,Q. 17, article 6) The stuff of theological hope is much bigger than a mere ball making its way into a net. It involves our actual happiness and our ultimate goal of being with God in heaven.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes hope as desiring the kingdom of God and relying not on ourselves but on Jesus Christ to get us there. (CCC 1817) The Holy Spirit is a necessary component. This is the hope we rely on when the world seems to have taken a sideways turn, the hope that gets us through the tough times, the belief that while this time is good, there are better times ahead. We are pilgrims on a journey home and sometimes that journey is stinking hard.

Do Americans have less hope than the rest of the world? Is that why we haven’t embraced soccer as they have? I don’t think so. For as much as faith has declined in the United States, it has been on a sharper decline in Europe, where soccer is almost a religion. I think Americans have passionate hope. We must. Why else would we sit through two hours and 36 minutes of baseball or four hours of golf?

I do think we are lacking in theological hope. Mental illness is increasing, especially among teens and young adults. People are horrible to each other on social media. The family unit is crumbling and church attendance still hasn’t returned to pre-COVID levels. We need hope.

We need to remember that it doesn’t all rely on us. We need to remember that God made all of us with dignity and in his image. We need to remember that he is present and waiting for us in every Catholic church, wanting to help us as we move through our day. Once I started leaning into what hope really is and embracing my desire for eternity with Jesus and the reality of that, I experienced a peace that I knew was not of me but of him.

I get aggravated at how things are sometimes. I wish things were different, but I find enormous comfort in the hope of union with God and the realization of all that is true, good and beautiful. It reminds me that while my time here on earth is important, it’s not all there is and one day, God willing, it will become a very, very small point in the distant past as I enjoy being with the glory of God. That’s hope. That’s bigger than wanting Dominik Szoboszlai to pop one over the keeper’s head into the net.