Love of following the game. Because the game is not just an art, it’s drama too. It has great metropolitan and minor provincial theatres, with free-spending and penny-pinching impresarios and their megalomaniac obsessive directors. It has legions of critics and a fantastical rotating cast of angels and devils, geniuses and journeymen, fallen giants and rising stars. It offers the spotlight for individual brilliance while relishing the defiance and heart of collective endeavour. It has staged tragedy and comedy, epic and pantomime, unsophisticated music hall and inaccessible experimental performances. It does imperious triumph, lucky escapes, impossible comebacks and stubborn stalemates. It captures the brilliance of unpredictability, the uncertainty of the human heart and the human skill, of improvisation and dance. And those that follow it are not merely the crowd; they are the chorus. Consumers and commentators, spectators and participants, without whom every goal is just a ball in the back of the net, every victory just three points in the bag.
— David Goldblatt in The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football
