Locking down the locker room THE eventual score was the last thing on the minds of the 70,000 French and English fans in London’s Wembley stadium on November 17th, as they sang the Marseillaise before a friendly match. On the continent that invented it, football was once again more than sport. In this case, merely playing at all showed courage and solidarity—or perhaps just a determination to keep having the sort of fun that terrorists want to deny the Western world.
Symbolism has been embedded in European football at least since the “Christmas truce” of 1914, when German and British soldiers temporarily stopped shooting and played a game between the trenches. Americans, who split their passions between baseball, American football and basketball, have nothing quite like it. In an increasingly secular Europe, the game, with its iconography and chants, has overtones of religiosity and collective identity, says Gunter Gebauer, a sports philosopher at Berlin’s Free University.
This also makes football vulnerable. “If that’s our religion, that’s what terrorists will attack,” says Philipp…
