Spain’s victory in the 2026 World Cup will be etched in the country’s collective memory for a long time. As in 2010, millions of people followed the final with extraordinary intensity and then celebrated the triumph in streets and squares with a joy that seemed to far exceed the result of the match. But perhaps the true interest of this phenomenon lies not only in football. It may be revealing something deeper about ourselves.

We had witnessed similar scenes, albeit on a different scale, with the barge’s passage through the Bilbao estuary after Athletic’s cup victory: traffic and promenades gridlocked, families waiting for hours, and a crowd of nearly a million people devoted to watching the vessel pass by, almost the center of a procession. The same thing happens in Madrid at the Cibeles fountain, in Barcelona, ​​or in any country where a team achieves glory. The colors, the anthems, and the places of pilgrimage change, but the human impulse seems to be the same.

Émile Durkheim observed that religion is not merely about believing in dogmas or accepting a doctrine. It is, above all, a community that gathers around symbols, rituals, and a shared memory. Through these, the individual ceases to feel isolated and recognizes themselves as part of a reality that transcends them. The power they attribute to the sacred also comes from the community that celebrates it and into which they themselves are integrated.

This creates a kind of collective effervescence: that state of exaltation that arises when a crowd gathers to sing, cheer, repeat the same gestures, and share a common emotion. For a few moments, each person seems to step outside themselves and participate in an energy they would never experience alone. The community, so to speak, contemplates itself in its own symbols and reaffirms its existence through them.

While acknowledging the vast differences, contemporary football replicates some of these mechanisms. It has its temples—Maracanã, La Bombonera, the Centenario, Wembley, San Mamés, the Bernabéu—its chants, its almost sacred colors, and its heroes passed down from father to son. The stadium separates ordinary time from the liturgical time of the match, and the crowd, gathered around a single emblem, experiences precisely that intensification of collective life that Durkheim considered one of the fundamental characteristics of the religious phenomenon. Each club even possesses something akin to a creed. Athletic Bilbao has made loyalty to its youth academy a defining characteristic; Real Madrid, victory a true vocation; for decades, Barça transformed the motto “Més que un club” (More than a club) into a declaration of belonging. The team is inherited as one once inherited a farmhouse, a parish, or certain family traditions. Changing clubs can be experienced as a minor act of apostasy, while remaining loyal in defeat acquires an almost moral prestige.

It’s no wonder that someone might say, paraphrasing Marx, that football has become the new opium of the people or a contemporary version of the Roman circus. It offers escapism, dominates public discourse, creates idols, and, for a few hours, displaces worries and suffering. Moreover, a gigantic industry has sprung up around it, transforming passion into spectacle, advertising, and consumption.

However, reducing it all to the manipulation of opinion leaders or to simple business would be too simplistic. The industry didn’t create this passion; it was built upon it. No advertising campaign could mobilize hundreds of millions of people if it didn’t first find fertile ground in the human heart. Football triumphs because it responds, even if only partially and fleetingly, to needs that are much deeper and predate the market.

Cohesion and rivalry

Man does not live by working, producing, and consuming alone. He needs to celebrate, share symbols, admire excellence, recognize himself in a common history, and feel part of a reality greater than himself. He needs to be able to say “we” in an age that constantly pushes him toward the isolation of the “self” and, with it, toward the progressive eclipse of the “other.”

For centuries, this cohesive function was fulfilled by religion, popular festivals, the local community, and national consciousness. In secularized, fragmented, and increasingly individualistic societies, football has come to occupy some of the space left vacant by those forms of belonging.

Few images are as eloquent as that of millions of Spaniards celebrating their national team’s victory together. For a few hours, political, territorial, generational, and social differences seem to dissolve. People who would likely disagree on almost everything embrace after a goal and discover that they are part of the same “we.” Triumph doesn’t eliminate conflicts, but it suspends them; it makes visible a community that seemed to have vanished and returns to the nation, if only for a moment, the awareness of a shared joy.

Football unites the grandfather who remembers the players of his childhood with the child who has just learned their names; the emigrant watching the match far from home with the one following it from the town square; the believer and the agnostic, the conservative and the progressive. For ninety minutes, they are all equalized by the same uncertainty and the same hope.

But there is also a darker dimension. Every “us” seems to need a “them.” Belonging breeds rivalry, and rivalry can produce hostility. The history of football is replete with episodes of violence, racism, humiliation of the opponent, and exclusionary nationalism. What happened after the final between some Spanish and Argentinian players served as a reminder that the line between competition and confrontation can be very fragile.

René Girard argued that human desire is imitative: we desire what others desire, and this coincidence easily turns us into rivals. When rivalry knows no bounds, it can spread and lead to violence. Sport, to a large extent, fulfills a restraining function: nations compete through national teams, cities rival each other in stadiums, and the adversary is symbolically fought, not destroyed.

Football has not abolished violence, nor can it single-handedly resolve political or social conflicts. But it allows rivalry to be ritualized and subjected to rules accepted by all. During the match, everything seems decisive; once the game is over, life must go on and regain its composure, except for a few fanatics incapable of accepting defeat.

It is no wonder, then, that it evokes such powerful emotions. It symbolically represents some of the great human experiences: combat, fortune, arbitrariness, discipline, downfall, resilience, guilt, redemption, and hope. A player can go from guilty to hero in seconds; a seemingly defeated team can rise again in minutes; the weak can defeat the powerful, and an unexpected action can change a destiny that seemed predetermined.

Football thus offers a drama without a script. We know that nothing that happens is truly decisive, but during the match we experience it as if it were. Much of its fascination lies in that contradiction.

Great sporting events come and go; the question of what makes them possible remains. Because the World Cup doesn’t create the need for unity: it simply brings it to light. It doesn’t invent the desire for belonging or the yearning for transcendence: it reveals them.

Beyond the stadium

However, there is a crucial difference between new secular cults, such as sports, and religious spirituality.

Football can offer excitement, beauty, identity, discipline, and a sense of belonging. It can momentarily reconcile a divided society, awaken virtues such as sacrifice, loyalty, and teamwork, and provide a shared joy that few contemporary realities manage to evoke.

But it cannot answer man’s ultimate questions. No championship eliminates suffering. No cup conquers illness. No victory stops the passage of time. No sporting hero escapes old age, and no ovation can definitively silence the fear of death.

The joy of football is real, but fleeting. Today’s champion will have to defend their title tomorrow; the hero will be replaced by another, and the victory that seemed to culminate everything will soon become a memory. Each trophy breeds the desire for a new one because none can ever be truly final.

This is where the limitations of civil religions become apparent: politics, sports, popular music, film, and other large-scale mass entertainment. They can provide rituals, symbols, fervor, and community, but they lack an ultimate answer to suffering, guilt, injustice, or death. They celebrate victories, but they cannot promise a final victory. They produce heroes, but not saints; memory, but not eternity.

The problem, therefore, is not football, just as it isn’t art, science, or love of country. All these things ennoble existence and allow humanity to transcend itself. The problem arises when a limited reality tries to take the place of the absolute and is asked to do what, by its very nature, it cannot do.

Chesterton observed that when man ceases to believe in God, he doesn’t necessarily cease to believe altogether, but may end up believing in anything. This observation points to a profound truth: human beings rarely relinquish the desire to orient their lives toward something they consider superior to themselves. When ancient altars are torn down, the need to venerate doesn’t disappear; often, only the objects of veneration change.

Football can then become an idol, but also a sign. It can distract man from his spiritual quest or remind him, unexpectedly, that he still needs communion, hope, and a reality that transcends him. What seems like a substitute for religion ends up revealing the persistence of religious need.

What if this secular religiosity is not replacing religion, but slowly and silently preparing its return, as has happened so many times throughout history?

It is certainly significant that, amidst this sporting spectacle, many of its main protagonists do not conceal their explicit religiosity. Coach Luis de la Fuente has declared his Catholic faith on several occasions; so have captain Rodri and Ferrán Torres, scorer of the decisive goal, while Lamine Yamal, at the final whistle, prostrated himself on the pitch in a gesture of worship to Allah. Beyond the diversity of beliefs, these gestures remind us that even those who participate in new forms of secular religiosity—singers, athletes, actors, or politicians—continue to seek a transcendent reference point. The stadium does not always replace the temple; sometimes it can lead us back to it.

One might ask whether we are not incompletely interpreting our times. For decades, it was assumed that secularization would inevitably lead to the disappearance of religion. However, the exact opposite could be happening. The extraordinary success of major sporting events, certain massive concerts, and other collective celebrations may not be proof that humanity has abandoned the spiritual dimension, but rather an indication that it still needs it and is seeking, sometimes in a confused way, new ways to express it. It could well be that these manifestations do not herald the end of religion, but the beginning of a new pendulum swing toward transcendence.

Perhaps the extraordinary success of football does not demonstrate that modern man has found a replacement for the sacred, but exactly the opposite: that, even in a technologically advanced and secularized society, he still needs rituals, symbols, heroes, celebrations and a shared hope.

When the referee blows the final whistle, the stadium empties and the lights go out. The champions return home; the spectators, to a life that is often much duller. The flags are folded and a new season begins. But the human heart continues to yearn for something more.

No trophy can conquer death, no ovation can definitively satisfy the desire for happiness, and no sporting glory can answer the ultimate questions of existence. No football victory can be eschatological: all of them already contain, in the very moment of their celebration, the certainty that they will pass. But humankind is not made solely to celebrate fleeting victories, but to seek a fulfillment that no finite reality can offer.

For this very reason, this World Cup can be much more than the greatest sporting event of our time and one of the great collective memories of contemporary Spain. It can also constitute one of the most revealing images of humankind: a being that continues to need to gather, to sing, to feel emotion, to fight symbolically, and to look toward something that transcends it; a being that, even when it believes it has replaced the sacred, still carries deep within it a longing for the infinite that no earthly victory can satisfy.