It’s the first full day of Euro 2016 and therefore the perfect time to talk about football – and sports in general. Family folklore says I was watching the ice hockey games of Lake Placid Winter Olympics with absolute concentration on my father’s lap and have never stopped watching sports since. I must have been less than a month old at the time, but the only thing I find odd about the story is that I was watching ice hockey – it’s never been among my favourite sports. Then again, if there ever was a good time to be a fan, it was surely when the Miracle on Ice happened.

I spent my childhood and teenage years obsessed with two things: reading (already covered extensively on this blog) and sport. I diligently wrote down the times and points and other statistics in little notebooks and carefully highlighted the significant ones. I still remember seeing Ruud Gullit for the first time in his orange shirt when I was six and I recall the 1991 World Championships in Athletics with more clarity than most of the things that happened last year (did you watch that long jump battle between Carl Lewis and Mike Powell? Holy Crap!). I also had detailed knowledge of the Olympic Games that took place before I was born, thanks to the Estonian tradition of publishing books about them, describing all the events in detail. 1968 Mexico City was my particular favourite – and included another historic long jump competition. I reread the book so many times that I knew parts of it by heart, for some reason finding gymnastics especially fascinating.

I now watch less than I used to – partly because I don’t have a TV, partly because the urge is no longer as great. These days, I would probably not stay up several nights in a row as I did during Nagano winter games. But big sports events are still the only times when I actually miss having a TV and I still get an enormous amount of pleasure out of watching them. I have often wondered why that is. Many people say that sport is where we act out our most basic instincts, the need to win (or at least to be on the side of the winners), to compete, to come as close to death and destruction as we can, while still remaining civilized. A modern version of watching the gladiators.

I don’t think this is true or at least not ONLY this is true. Sport is an excellent canvas on which to project who we are and what we want. It is of course very entertaining, but often in a much more benevolent way than the ‘basic instinct’ hypothesis would suggest. We cheer for the underdog, we love the team spirit, we sometimes sincerely think that winning isn’t everything. Sport is also immensely analysable, it provides endless opportunities for having opinions, being an expert, discussing and arguing, predicting and dissecting. That aspect has always been important for me. And I think it’s also been important that sport is worldbuilding. It has its own logic and rules, its own stars and villains and beautiful maidens. And as the rules are much clearer than in life and it’s often also more exciting, it’s of course an excellent option for escapism. I’m not at all surprised that I like both speculative fiction and sport.

Football is an excellent example of all this. It IS almost a world to itself, as it’s gotten so big and so important for many (I always find it amusing that The Guardian has sport and football sections, not football as a part of other sports). It is fun to watch and to analyse. When I try to think why football is so effective at all those things, I always think of Umberto Eco – who has in fact written very perceptively about sport himself. When his novel The Name of The Rose was published in Estonian, everyone was going on about how multi-layered it was, until it became a tiresome critical cliché. That you could read it as a regular detective story, but also on much deeper levels, in case you got all the references to medieval philosophy, obscure literature and semiotics.

While I absolutely adore The Name of the Rose, I have my doubts about anyone reading it for the murders only. But it’s true that depending on your intellectual background, what you get out of the novel differs – and you can enjoy the experience regardless of your entry level. This is true for football, too – possibly more than of Eco’s book. You can easily enjoy football when the only thing you know about it is that it’s a good thing when the ball ends up in the goal (good one team, that is). You can also enjoy it when you feel a deep loyalty to a team your family has supported for decades and you don’t really care about the rest of football. You can enjoy it when you like to discuss in detail whether the 4-4-2 formation has a place in the modern football or whether playing Cesc Fabregas as a false 9 really is a wise thing to do. You can enjoy it simply for the physicality and the pretty players, although the ban on taking the shirt off has diminished that pleasure somewhat.

Or you can enjoy it more-or-less once every two years, when the big tournaments come around. Spending time in bars of suspect hygiene standars, cheering along with some scary-looking Albanian fans. Secretly watching the games on your computer when you should be working. Being heartbroken when a goalkeeper botches a save, because it’s always tragic. Making sarcastic jokes on the expense of the commentators who clearly know NOTHING of football. Developing crushes on teams you thought you’d never like and growing disillusioned with the ones you used to love. This is, broadly speaking, how I do football.

I hope Belgium will win. I believe France will. And I’m not as scared as some other people that it’ll actually be Germany.*

*An example of multilayered thinking I’m sure Eco would have been proud of.