Up The Villa
- David Brand
- Apr 20, 2024
- 7 min read
“And we’re Aston Villa, Aston Villa FC! We’re by far the greatest team, the world has ever seen!” The Holte End
Singing this song as a thirteen-year old lad, watching my beloved Villa get beaten by an Alan Shearer-inspired Blackburn Rovers, struck me as just ridiculous. I mean, even half-a-decade into my lifelong devotion to my beloved Birmingham-based Claret & Blues, I thought I knew this statement was utter fake-news.
Oh me of little faith…
Making Football Great Again
I love the beautiful game, the only truly global sport, born in Cambridge in England, on the tranquil university city’s Parkers Piece common-land playing field, the location where the rules to the world’s obsession were first codified in 1848.
But I fell in love with this football during a time her beauty had become scarred and marred by hijackers – men who chose to use soccer matches as a convenient vehicle on which to attach their parasitical desire to fight, riot and vent their frustration at how society functioned for them.
I sympathise with and even share some of frustrations these men felt, oppressed and discriminated against as the rich who held political power got richer, while they got poorer.
I don’t however condone in any way how football hooligans vented their frustrations in such a toxic manner.
Love’s Got the World in Motion
The World Cup is like Christmas Day for me – in terms of the excitement levels at least – but lasting for over a month.
I think every lover of the beautiful game remembers their first World Cup, especially vividly. It’s something akin to experiencing your first kiss, I think.
Italia ‘90 was my first World Cup. It was like nothing else my nine year old self had yet encountered. It was beyond exciting to me. I still sometimes listen to Luciano Pavarotti’s version of Puccini’s Aria Nessun Dorma, simply to take me back to that glorious summer of love, when my hero, Aston Villa’s David Platt, saved England from the agony of a last-sixteen penalty shoot-out against Belgium, famously “in the last minute of extra-time”.
The Power of Love
Love has the power to change the world, because God is love.
Love is the invisible connection of mutual, passionate, selfless care between two or more human beings.
Love can transform people, it can transform communities, it can transform cities, it can transform the entire world.
Love can only reach its full transformative potential if it has an infrastructure through which to disseminate. Or to use more appropriate words, love needs people to flow through.
The more aligned, more intimate, more close-knit, more united-behind-a-cause a group of people is, the better connected together they are – and therefore the more efficiently and powerfully love can flow through them all between each other.
A community of football supporters, all aligned and united behind one team, creates exactly the right conditions for love to flow to its most intense, unhindered level.
These same infrastructural-conditions also create exactly the right environment for hatred to flow to its most intense, unhindered level.
That’s why hooligans hi-jacked football. It was never about football, it was only about exploiting its community-structures. That’s why football-related violence should only ever be seen as a reflection of the feelings among wider society.
Dr Feelgood
Politicians have known for years the power of sport – in particular football – to influence and bring about societal change.
It’s not even subtle how they do it. You only needed listen to Sir Kier Starmer tell BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs a few years ago how one of his favourite songs is ‘Three Lions’ to know he’ll be doing a fair amount of jumping-onto societal bandwagons this summer – an election year – if the England Men’s team do well at the forthcoming European Championships.
The Corinthian Spirit
The global game, born on a Victorian English university playing field, no longer has its centre of influence there.
You could make a very credible argument for saying South America has long been the powerhouse of the beautiful game.
In Brazil, the most successful ever nation in World Cup history, many of the country’s club sides have their founding roots in England. A quick glance at their club crests will tell you that.
One team’s name in particular also communicates their cultural heritage being rooted in the Christian faith. Corinthians of São Paulo were founded in 1910, their name emblematic of the ‘corinthian ideal’ of sportsmanship, fair-play and playing only for the love of the game. High standards indeed.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (NIV)
The Religion of Football
Football is a religion.
I mean this absolutely literally. A religion is simply a human construct – a set of traditions, rituals, habits, structures and repeated ways of doing things, that help a group of people give collective praise and worship to something.
That something could be a football team. That something could be God.
Either way, it’s still a religion, and religion – whether it’s focused on a football team or a deity – is extremely powerful, because of the close-knit community it enables and sustains.
Aston Villa is another club rooted in Christianity. It was formed out of the Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel cricket team who wanted to play a sport to keep fit in the winter. They tried Rugby-football and Association-Football, and in 1874 decided to put all their eggs completely in the soccer basket and become the club it still is to this very day.
One of the key figures in Aston Villa’s entire history was a gentleman called William McGregor. His statue stands right outside Villa Park today.
The whole world of football – and by default the whole world – owes grateful thanks to William McGregor. This zealous, Victorian Scotsman, was a committed Christian, widely respected for his honesty and integrity. He worshipped for forty years at the Congregational Church in Wheeler Street, Aston.
McGregor was also Chairman of Aston Villa and the man who was the driving force behind the first football league set up anywhere on the planet. Before McGregor, football had no structure, no organisation, no cohesion to its fixtures. Teams just played each other at not much more than random.
William McGregor would change all that. He wrote to clubs located around the Midlands and north of England and galvanised them to work together to form a structured, properly organised league. In 1888, 12 clubs played in the first ever season of the world’s first ever football league, including the very same Blackburn Rovers club I’d watch beat Villa by a single goal 106 years later.
Every football league in the whole world today can trace its roots back to the visionary idea McGregor had the zeal to get off the ground those years ago.
Essentially, the world has Aston Villa – and specifically William McGregor – for founding what is now the globe’s largest religion.
That is why I believe Aston Villa is indeed the greatest team the world has ever seen.
I’ve come to faith, these days!
The Football/Life Analogy
Jesus was born in a stable in Bethlehem in the year 0 AD.
Football was born in a field in Cambridge in 1848.
Saint Peter founded the Church, the religious-structure that helps people connect with, praise and worship Jesus Christ, on the first ever Pentecost.
When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, as recorded in Acts 2:1-4 (NIV)
William McGregor founded the religion of Association Football in 1888.
Love that Floods the World
I long for love to flood the whole world, to bring about a New World Order as it sets a whole new societal culture in motion.
For this to happen, the global Church needs to become better organised. Instead of being a siloed, disconnected, disjointed, sometimes in-fighting body, it must come together in collaborative, efficient, effective unity – while simultaneously celebrating and cherishing its beautiful diversity.
Just as William McGregor had a God-given vision back in 1888, combined with a zeal and determination to see it shaped into a reality, so I have been given by God a vision to see a global Church that can be connected up to really enable love to flow throughout and flood the whole world.
McGregor had his fair share of naysayers, critics and sceptics back in 1888, and look where we are today… his story gives me so much motivation, inspiration, encouragement and hope as I pursue the professional calling God’s given me in life.
I guess I was born to be a Villa fan; I did enter the world in the year we last won the English league, after all…
Up The Villa!
With love,
David
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