Football is entirely spatial. It requires at the very least an area to play in which defines and orientates a space. If larger, it requires a stadium, impacting the surrounding areas significantly.

When established, football clubs can alter economies, create social tension, change land value, enhance communities, distract from the mundane and bring tears of joy or happiness.

It bleeds into pop culture, spans generations, and produces iconic places, people and moments which become hugely important parts of the lives of fans. 

The provocation is that football is a modern religion - or at least can be seen that way.

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To set the scene, Andrew Brown from The Guardian writes “Religions aren’t made from specifically religious behaviours or thoughts, but from ordinary patterns of thought and behaviour which are assembled in particular ways” but still intends to deny football as a religion.

Pope Sixtus V (1585-90) ordered obelisks to be erected to mark the ritual paths that linked the major basilicas of Rome. The urban motifs act as monuments within the city.

It is the fixity and absoluteness of architectural objects that allows temporal processes such as pilgrimages intelligible cadence.

“Sixtus V’s obelisks exemplify how objects within sacred space are never self-referntial, even in their radical singularity, but always point to a sequence which unfolds in a specific direction.”

They emphasise the heirarchy of importance within the city. It doesn’t just include the visiting of architecure, but also the journey itself.