Chelsea: Football is not unimportant, unless you want to say everything is

Football has had several weeks of Very Important Commentaries by Very Thoughtful Pundits about how inconsequential and unimportant sports are. Chelsea, football and sports are not inconsequential, unless you want to follow that statement to its logical extreme.

Most media outlets staved off the content starvation of virus interruptus with a week or two of thinkpieces about the frivolity of football and sports in general against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic. Chelsea fans, #influencers on LinkedIn and commentators famous for being famous commentators all offered their Very Serious Reflection about what’s really important in a locked down, quarantined world.

They’re all narrowly correct. Football and sports are not matters of life and death. They do not keep us alive. We metaphorically eat, breathe and sleep Chelsea. But Chelsea does not sustain us nutritionally, cardiovascularly or otherwise physiologically.

Neither do televisions, computers nor the desks we write from. A free press is vital to health of a free society, but it is not important to the functioning of a human body, the way the medicine and breathing support given to patients in the hospital are. Newspapers (in print and digital form), the BBC, SkySports, and, yes, the entire MinuteMedia family of digital properties are all inconsequential and unimportant by the same standards as football and sports.

If football is inconsequential and unimportant, so is electric or motorized transportation, individual or mass. So are individual dwelling units, owned or leased. As are the furniture and kitchen appliances and cookware and books and wall hangings and grooming products and notes from mom and the beagle barking at the neighbours riding their equally inconsequential and unimportant scooters down the sidewalk no one really needs when there are people sick and dying in a hospital.

By the standards of life or death, everything above subsistence is unimportant. By the standard of sustaining life, anyone whose vocation has them do anything other than provide clean water and 700 grams of carbohydrate per person per day is in an inconsequential and unimportant line of work.

The 12 years of Catholic school in the back of my head is nodding along, saying nothing in this world is important.

Football, sports, entertainment, media, comforts of home, family and friends are not frivolous. They are more than “the things that make life worth living.” They are the things that make life and a way of life worth working for and protecting. Ours are more varied and intense than previous generations of humanity, but every society and generation has theirs. Part of the human condition is having those things – in whatever abundance possible – that elevate us above an existence of subsistence.

For thousands of people who work in football, football is the means by which they enable and protect those things in their own lives – as well as pay for their basic sustenance in food and medicine.

I have a very convenient trick to stop most bad prescriptives and rhetoric in their tracks: demand to know the limiting principle. If football is inconsequential and unimportant, tell me what is the least thing that is consequential and important. We’ll either end up with an extreme or an arbitrary line, two outcomes perfect for these times.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with things that are simply nice to have. And there should be no social cachet gained by pooh-poohing one’s life work or extra-professional interests, certainly not because they are not matters of life and death.