Article

Belief

Community

Creed

Sport

10 April 2025

5 min read

Is Goodison Park a place of worship?

Delve beyond the identity and the inspiration.

Henry Corbett

Henry Corbett, a vicar in Liverpool and chaplain to Everton Football Club.

Football fans wearing blue stand and watch a match in a stadium.

Everton fans hope.

Everton F.C.

In some places football is considered a religion. No more so than in Liverpool. Its citizens revere not just one team but two - the Blues and the Reds.

It's a divided city. Some wear the blue of Everton FC, others the red of Liverpool FC. A mere mile separates the stadia where supporters pay homage to their heroes.

As the chaplain to Everton, I often contemplate this devotion. Is Everton’s stadium Goodison Park a place of worship? And is football really a religion?

The quick answer is “Yes” and “No”. Goodison Park is surely a place of worship, and football is not a religion, though that second answer may need a bit of a defence.

That football grounds are places of worship is instanced at every game played: chants of praise are sung and worth is given to the players, the team, the history, the manager, maybe even the owner.

Goodison Park has hosted games since 1892. The attendance at the ground’s opening was 12,000, the cost £3,000, and the point of it all? Everton Football Club had begun in 1878 as St Domingo’s, founded by a Methodist minister. The Rev Ben Swift Chambers wanted to keep his St Domingo’s Church cricket team fit during the winter, and the cricket team was to help young men stay away from less worthy pursuits. Similarly, Manchester City was founded by Anna Connell, the vicar’s daughter, to keep young men on the streets of East Manchester away from trouble.

St Domingo’s then became Everton FC and later came the move to the new stadium on Goodison Road. The crowds brought gate receipts, the players and staff needed wages, and football clearly becomes a business as well as an activity to help young men avoid trouble.

Then and now the game is entertaining, the outcome is unpredictable, and the players can show outstanding skills, athleticism, courage, resilience, teamwork.

That’s where the worship naturally comes in. Awe and wonder are important human attributes, and Evertonians have delighted in the skills and character of players down the club’s 147-year history. At every football ground there will be chants for players that celebrate their skill, character, achievements, giving worth to their ability. And yes, there may also be chants doing the opposite of worship to the opponents and to the unlucky referee just trying to do their job. The team is celebrated and worshipped, sometimes in language that is hard to believe: “We’re by far the greatest team the world has ever seen” can feel like undeserved worship when Everton are struggling to avoid relegation. Such optimistic sentiment may reflect Evertonians’ awareness of the importance of history and the bigger picture! Another chant begins “And if you know your history...”.

Outside Goodison Park is a statue of Dixie Dean: he scored 60 league goals in the 1927-28 season and his ability and achievement is worshipped, given great worth, by many before and after a game. The other statue outside the ground is of the “Holy Trinity”, Howard Kendall, Alan Ball and Colin Harvey, the midfield three that helped bring the League title to Everton in 1970. Many such players in the history of the club have received and still receive worship. Goodison Park is a place of hope, frustration, joy, anguish, and, yes, of worship.

But is football a religion? Goodison Park is called by some a cathedral, the club has fans, it conveys an identity, the game offers principles for living such as teamwork and the valuing of different gifts.

Yes, football is like a religion, and understandably religious language and gesture are often used around the game. “Salvation!” says the commentator as Graham Stuart scores the winning goal in the 3-2 win over Wimbledon to keep Everton in the Premier League. Television cameras can home in on a supporter clasping their hands in prayer at some decisive moment.

And yes, football can play a part in someone’s life that is very like the part a religion can play: it can become the most important thing, it can shape mood, behaviour, it can provide long-lasting rituals.

But it is one thing for football to be like a religion in some respects, it is another for it genuinely to qualify as a religion.

This of course begs the question “how are you defining religion?” I am going for the stronger definition. So, I’m not agreeing with a statement such as “shopping is your religion”. I would rather say “shopping is one of your passions, interests, maybe overriding interests, but no, not a religion”. Some of the stronger dictionary definitions include “A system of beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence”, and “the way people deal with ultimate concerns about their life” and “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe”.

Does football meet those definitions, does football answer the deepest questions of life?

Who am I? An Evertonian, but deeper than that, who am I?

What is the purpose of my life beyond hoping Everton win football matches?

What happens after death?

Football does not address those ultimate concerns. It is like a religion in offering identity, inspiring worship, having a gathering point like Goodison Park for communal activity, but it is not a religion as it does not address those ultimate questions.

I will be going to worship the skills and characters of players, coaches, staff and manager at Goodison Park before the season ends, but I don’t see my love of football as a religion. The Christian faith is my religion: it addresses the deepest questions, the ultimate concerns, just as other religions seek to do.

There is more to life than football. As an Everton manager, a practising Catholic, Carlo Ancelotti once said: “Football is the most important of the less important things”.

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Review

Care

Community

Culture

Film & TV

25 March 2025

5 min read

Amandaland's portrayal of falling social standing is spot on

What happens when motherhood is no longer rich, powerful, and terrifying.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

On the sidelines of a pitch a well-dressed mum hands a coat to a sceptical looking mum beside her.

Nobody likes mums. Not really. We talk about our kids all the time, we’re bossy, we’re interfering, we’re no fun. The stereotypes abound. Not even mums like other mums. We should help each other, but we often end up mercilessly judging each other instead. If you work, you’re a cruel, neglectful mother; if you’re a stay-at-home mum, you’re lazy, weak, and probably boring.

Even worse than being disliked, though, is not being taken seriously. I thought motherhood would bestow a certain level of respect, a kind of admission, from society at large, that if you can keep a human being alive – let alone several – you must be somewhat competent at least. I can now see that’s only the case in older motherhood, once your children are grown up and you can prove to the world that you did, in fact, do a good job of raising them. Before then, while your kids are still loud toddlers or moody teenagers, being a mother is a decidedly low-status affair.

That’s exactly what Amandaland, the new Motherland spin-off, gets right. In Motherland, the original show, the character of Amanda is a confident, terrifying alpha mum, a modern anti-heroine and a foil to the frazzled, overwhelmed protagonist Julia. As a stay-at-home mum, Amanda holds on to her high social status by a combination of displaying her husband’s wealth and a careful strategy of putting other mothers down at every possible occasion.

By the end of Motherland, however, Amanda is lost: she opens and very quickly closes a lifestyle shop, she’s about to lose her house in the divorce, and her ex-husband is about to remarry. She’s not quite so terrifying anymore; she’s more human, more fragile. Her insecurities begin to show.

It’s only in Amandaland, however, that her alpha-mum persona fully breaks down. She’s had to downsize and – gasp – move from Acton to a less affluent part of London; her ex-husband is refusing to pay for their kids’ private school or for her car; she has no career and no prospects. While materially still more privileged than many, in the eyes of society she’s lost any claim to admiration.

As she meets a host of mums and dads from her kids’ new school after her move, it’s obvious that Amanda is trying to conceal this drastic change. She refers to all the furniture which she’s hording from her old, much bigger house – in her mother’s garage – as ‘curated items from my style archive’. When her mother nudges her to get rid of said ‘curated items’ in the school’s car boot sale, she deflects by declaring, in a suitably dramatic way, ‘I’m so ready to streamline all these investment pieces’. In the next episode she starts showing off, at her kids’ football practice, that ‘this big-shot interiors firm just begged me for a meet at their flagship store’. What she means is that she’s got a job interview at a kitchen and bathroom showroom. Which job she does get, by the way, and proceeds to refer to it for the rest of the show as her ‘collab’.

I said that nobody likes mums. I should have said, more accurately, that most people don’t find caregivers interesting.

There’s a reason Amanda speaks in cringeworthy euphemisms half of the time, and it’s not because she delights in being irritating. It’s because she’s feeling the full force of her fall in social status. We can judge her for being shallow enough to care about wealth and appearance so much. But it’s impossible for me not to feel an enormous amount of sympathy for her. I know what it’s like to see someone’s gaze at a social event drift away as you mention that you’re a stay-at-home mum. I know the agonizingly overnice look that often meets you when you say you’ve been trying to get back to work after having kids.

And to be clear, I’ve been referring to ‘mothers’ throughout, but consciously being perceived as low status is an experience common to all primary caregivers. In Motherland, Kevin, the stay-at-home dad of the group, was often mocked and dismissed as insignificant for looking after his two daughters full time. I said that nobody likes mums. I should have said, more accurately, that most people don’t find caregivers interesting.

There are two ways to respond to the plain fact that caregiving is seen as low status and low value, and Amanda learns both over the course of the show. The first is to realise we have an innate value that cannot be determined by social approval. We must become comfortable with being sneered at; there’s no way around it. Without spoiling what happens in later episodes, Amanda does grow in virtue by valuing status less and less, eventually rejecting the opportunity to return to wealth and high status for the sake of her family and her own integrity.

The second way is to find fellowship. The friendships which Amanda forms, especially with the wonderful Anne, also an original Motherland character, are what save her from herself in the end. Anne and the other parents show her that they, at least, don’t care that she’s no longer rich, powerful, and terrifying. They chip away at her armour until she realises that she doesn’t need to be adored in order to be loved.

We cannot control how people perceive us, but we can control how we respond. At the beginning of the show, Amanda’s response to the challenges of motherhood was to sink into self-absorption. In the end, she’s redeemed by the kindness of her friends. Motherhood will, perhaps, always be a thankless, low status job. But it’s also, and will always be, an irreplaceable one.

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