Christianity is thriving on the football pitch. Despite the declining number of Christians in the UK, Instagram, X, and other social media sites are awash with biblical quotes. And those responsible? Professional footballers.
Over recent years, something of a movement appears to have developed in English football. Players, previously so determinedly secular, have become not only practising Christians, but also individuals who are happy to broadcast their faith to a wide audience.
Palace captain Marc Guehi wrote ‘I love Jesus’ and ‘Jesus loves you’ over a rainbow armband
Every weekend, top flight footballers either use quotes as motivation for their approaching match, or thank God if the contest reached a successful conclusion. Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka met the news of his recent injury by describing it as ‘#GodsPlan’. Following last weekend’s draw with Chelsea, Crystal Palace’s Eberechi Eze declared the outcome to be ‘not by might nor by power, but by his spirit’. Jurrien Timber, Arsenal’s Dutch defender, leaves supporters scrabbling for their nearest Bible by cryptically stating ‘Isaiah 43:19’, or ‘Luke 1:14’. If you follow your favourite footballers online, the chances are that you’ll be familiar with these invocations.
A spotlight was thrown on this trend recently, when Palace captain Marc Guehi wrote ‘I love Jesus’ and ‘Jesus loves you’ over a rainbow armband worn to support LGBT+ communities. Amidst commentators’ performative gasps and groans, everyone overlooked that Guehi’s stencilled note was not in any way surprising. It was merely symbolic of the rise of evangelical Christianity across elite football.
The church’s relationship with football in England is long and complex. Early forms of the game were disdained because of the violence that sometimes erupted on, and off, the pitch; traditionalists also didn’t like the fact that some games were played on a Sunday, the Sabbath. However, with the turn into the 20th century, churches around Britain increasingly advocated the sport as something that fostered ‘healthy bodies’. Everton, Fulham, Manchester City, and Southampton were all formed by local church organisations; north of the border, Celtic have always been intimately linked to Glasgow’s Catholic community.
Individual English players rarely made their own religious views overt. In the latter half of the 20th century, tales of footballers’ faith are few and far between. World Cup winner Nobby Stiles attended Mass every day during the 1966 campaign. Wolves forward Peter Knowles quit football to become a Jehovah’s Witness in 1969. But these stories formed the exception rather than the rule. If anything, Christianity was looked down upon. Renowned ‘hard man’ Roy McDonagh was frustrated by what he described as Cambridge United’s ‘Holy Trinity’ in the 1980s. In his words, the club’s trio of Christians, including future Manchester United manager David Moyes, were ‘discussing their beliefs when they should have been getting psyched up for a relegation scrap’.
But in recent years, bucking the trend of diminishing Christianity elsewhere in British society, footballers have become far more open about their faith. At the recent European Championships, a self-described English ‘God Squad’ was formed, comprising Eze, Saka, Ivan Toney, and Guehi. This mirrored a Bible study group held by the Dutch national team, attended by 15 of their 26-man squad. Saka publicly presents himself as ‘God’s Child’, while Dutchman Memphis Depay defines himself by 2 Corinthians 5:7 – ‘walking in faith, not by sight’.
Why has football become so proudly Christian? The reasons are predictably various. In the early 1990s, a set of footballers including Cyril Regis and Justin Fashanu began to normalise overt faith in dressing rooms. Graham Daniels, one of those pioneers, describes how a ‘precedent’ was set, with players pointing to the ‘holistic’ benefits a strict Christian lifestyle could provide. When tied into the increased professionalism and pressures that the modern game has brought, Christianity was seen as providing a mental outlet and moral reference-point.
Premier League demographics and the rising number of participants from outside Britain also play a role. In 1992, there were 13 foreign players in the Premier League. Now, 66.2 per cent of players are from outside the UK. With many hailing from religious countries like Brazil and Spain, these new players have had an influence, offering more open displays of their Christian faith than their English counterparts. After Liverpool’s Roberto Firmino was baptised by his teammate Alisson Becker in 2020, the pair went viral for sobbing while clutched in each other’s arms.
But what has had the greatest impact is a change in wider British society. While church attendance has more than halved in the country as a whole, evangelical churches have bucked this trend. In immigrant communities, and especially in areas of south London, where many of England’s new generation of footballers were brought up, religion is far more present; a more overt vision of Christianity has been propagated there.
Those players explicitly espousing their Christian faith often come from immigrant (first, or second or even third generation) backgrounds; most are from evangelical or Pentecostal communities, reflecting the Premier League’s ever-increasing ethnic diversity. Nearly one in five players were from black and minority ethnic backgrounds in 1992, with that number rising to 43 per cent in 2022. It is natural that such trends should lead to the increasing visibility of the faiths that thrive within such communities. There is also the fact that, aided by social media, one of the key tenets of evangelicalism is that you talk about your faith, espouse it and spread the word; this marks a stark contrast to the quieter, more domestic expectations of Anglicanism.
The question posed by the response to Guehi’s statement is whether, moving forward, players may find themselves put under increasing pressure to mask their faith and beliefs. With football one of the few areas where Christianity is visibly resurgent in the UK, this is not a debate that will likely go away.
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