Global Gospel, Remote Control: How Football on TV Became the World’s Real Superpower
The global religion that requires no churches, only screens, kicked off again last weekend. From Lagos barrios to Lapland igloos, billions of the faithful gathered around flickering rectangles to watch twenty-two millionaires chase a ball and, more importantly, one another’s existential dread. Football on television has quietly become the most successful empire of the 21st century—no passports, no visas, just a subscription fee that climbs faster than a striker embellishing contact.
Consider the logistics: a single Saturday now unrolls like a NATO operation. At 06:30 GMT, the Premier League beams into Beijing breakfast bars where noodles are slurped in sync with a corner kick. By noon, La Liga hijacks Madrid’s siesta and Mumbai’s supper. Come dusk, the Americas tune in to whichever European league has most effectively monetized their nostalgia. The sun never sets on televised football; it merely hands the remote to the next time zone.
The commentators are our polyglot high priests. Martin Tyler’s genteel British euphemisms—“he’s not been shy in the tackle,” meaning attempted ankle removal—are translated, subtitled, and often improved upon: Arabic announcers turn every goal into a tremulous poem, while Brazilian narrators provide the kind of erotic gasping normally reserved for telenovela betrayals. Meanwhile, American networks still feel compelled to superimpose fluorescent power bars above players’ heads, as though the audience might panic without confirmation that running is indeed strenuous.
But the real spectacle is off-pitch. Watch any crowd shot and witness the universal human urge to perform for a camera we’ll never meet. Shirtless, pot-bellied saints paint their torsos in primary colors despite sub-zero winds. In Singapore, an entire condo complex synchronizes LED lights to form the Bayern crest, an act so devoted it probably violates several aviation regulations. Somewhere in the Arctic Circle, researchers at a climate-monitoring station pause their ice-core drilling to huddle around a laptop, praying the satellite bandwidth holds long enough to see if their fantasy-league captain scores. The poles are melting; priorities, apparently, are not.
Globalization’s finest trick is making local despair feel imported. When a mid-table Italian club misses a penalty, a betting syndicate in Jakarta groans louder than the ultras in Bergamo. The same dopamine pathways that once rewarded finding ripe berries now light up for a well-timed VAR reversal. Economists have stopped pretending Gross Domestic Product measures anything useful; they just track shirt sales in Lagos airports and hotel bookings in Doha. Qatar, that shimmering mirage of air-conditioned stadiums and borrowed labor, understood the assignment: if you can’t win hearts and minds, at least broadcast them in 8K HDR.
There is, of course, the small matter of ethics. The cameras politely avoid the chain-link fences around migrant workers’ quarters, the way Victorian portraits cropped out the tuberculosis. Every sweeping aerial of a floodlit cathedral of sport is filmed from drones that tactfully exclude the adjacent favela. We are invited to marvel at the grass’s chromatic perfection, never mind that it drinks more desalinated water per square meter than some nations allocate per citizen. The beautiful game, like any long-running series, has learned to kill its darlings off-screen.
And yet, for ninety-odd minutes plus stoppage time for human error, the world shares one communal hallucination. Stock markets hold their breath during Champions League shoot-outs; cease-fires have reportedly been timed to coincide with World Cup matches, because even warlords need to see if Messi finally drags Argentina past the quarters. The final whistle blows, the screen fades to a betting-app advert, and we return to our respective national catastrophes—slightly refreshed, slightly poorer, and already checking kick-off times for Thursday.
In the end, football on television is the planet’s most honest export: a product we pay to watch, a ritual we agree to pretend matters, and a reminder that no matter the language, we all scream the same obscenities at referees. Pass the remote; the empire is about to restart.
