TheMarketForIdeas

The story of the Tower of Babel tells us that humanity scattered the moment it ceased to speak the same language. Football suggests the opposite: that humanity occasionally remembers it still does.

Ever since Babel, history has been a long attempt to recover what myth says was lost in a single morning – through commerce, diplomacy, religion, science, or art. Yet there remain places where translators suddenly find themselves out of work. A football stadium is one of them.

Wittgenstein famously wrote that the limits of his language mean the limits of his world. Yet there exists a world that begins before language. Chomsky might have recognized, in the effortless way a child from Rosario, another from Tangier, one from Almería, and another from Osaka all understand the same through ball, the same feint, and the same despair of a penalty shoot-out, something akin to the universal grammar he spent a lifetime searching for. Only here it has been deciphered not by linguists, but by Diego, Lionel, and countless other footballing “poets” and “novelists”, to borrow Pier Paolo Pasolini’s memorable distinction, whose libraries-arena have never tolerated silence.

Football belongs to that remarkable class of human institutions that nobody consciously invented, yet everyone eventually came to depend upon. Friedrich Hayek observed that civilization’s greatest institutions rarely emerge from grand design. Language, customary law, markets, and money evolved gradually from innumerable anonymous interactions rather than from anyone’s blueprint. Football has followed much the same path. Like every successful spontaneous order, it eventually attracted those convinced they could administer it better than the myriads of individuals who had created it without ever intending to do so. Markets became economic policy, money became monetary engineering, language became ideological identity – and football became an industry. Yet its inner logic continues to elude central planning. Capital did not invent football. It merely learned, with admirable fluency and occasional cynicism, to speak its language.

Nowhere has that language been amplified more spectacularly than in the United States. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada, was more than the culmination of a sporting competition. It became another demonstration of America’s extraordinary ability to transform collective experiences into global spectacles. America does not always incept the phenomena that reshape the world, but it possesses an almost unrivalled talent for giving them scale, rhythm, and resonance. Hollywood did not invent storytelling. Silicon Valley did not invent information. Football certainly was not invented somewhere between Manhattan and the Pacific. Many Europeans view this commercialization with aristocratic nostalgia, as though markets somehow desecrated the game. More often than not, however, capital follows culture rather than corrupting it. When billions choose to watch the same final, money simply lines up behind human preference – or, more accurately, behind human passion. European football wrote the novel. America turned it into a blockbuster.

Here lies a paradox that neither economics nor sociology has entirely resolved. The geography of prosperity overlaps only imperfectly with the geography of footballing excellence. If gross domestic product determined sporting success, Luxembourg would dominate world football, while Uruguay would survive merely as a statistical footnote. Football accumulates more than financial capital. It also stores symbolic capital, memory, prestige, and tradition. It resembles a cathedral more than a factory: each generation builds not primarily for itself, but for those yet to come. Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski have shown that wealth improves sporting performance without guaranteeing greatness. GDP resembles height: invaluable in basketball, occasionally awkward on the dance floor. In football, comparative advantage is often cultural before it is economic. A modest neighbourhood in Buenos Aires may produce more footballing imagination than an entire financial district.

That perhaps explains another of football’s peculiarities. It generates solidarity and rivalry, cosmopolitanism and tribalism, openness and belonging – all at once. Norbert Elias would have argued that football does not eliminate our instincts; it civilizes them. The stadium remains one of the very few places where conflict willingly submits to rules and passion consents to impartial judgment. Outside its walls, hostility seeks annihilation. Inside them, victory usually suffices.

Albert Camus, who spent his youth as a goalkeeper before becoming a Nobel laureate, famously claimed that everything he knew about morality he had learned on the football pitch. George Orwell suspected that football could turn patriotism into fever. Jorge Luis Borges dismissed it with aristocratic disdain. Each captured part of the truth, because football possesses the curious ability to be liturgy and carnival, marketplace and courtroom, all at once. It is civilization in miniature, a place where billions of strangers accept that mistakes are part of the game, that rules matter precisely because emotions run high, and that no victory remains meaningful unless both sides first agree on how the game is to be played.

Football reminds us that civilization depends less on speaking the same language than on accepting the same rules. For ninety minutes, billions of people do exactly that – and discover that understanding one another was never the difficult part.

11 selected readings for football fans

Borges, J. L. (1999). Selected non-fictions (E. Weinberger, Ed.). Penguin Books. (Original works published 1932–1985)

Camus, A. (2007). Algerian chronicles (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1958)

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press.

Elias, N., & Dunning, E. (2008). Quest for excitement: Sport and leisure in the civilizing process (Rev. ed.). University College Dublin Press. (Original work published 1986)

Goldblatt, D. (2008). The ball is round: A global history of football. Riverhead Books.

Guttmann, A. (2004). From ritual to record: The nature of modern sports (Updated ed.). Columbia University Press.

Hayek, F. A. (1978). New studies in philosophy, politics, economics and the history of ideas. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Kuper, S., & Szymanski, S. (2022). Soccernomics (2022 World Cup ed.). Nation Books.

Orwell, G. (1945). The sporting spirit. Tribune.

Pasolini, P. P. (1971, January 3). Il calcio è un linguaggio con i suoi poeti e prosatori. Il Giorno.

Steiner, G. (1975). After Babel: Aspects of language and translation. Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.