Football and Waiting for Godot

The world is now captivated by football. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup football tournament has started on 11 June 2026 in Mexico. The tournament has been held every four years since the inaugural tournament in 1930, with the exception of 1942 and 1946 due to World War II.

This year, World Cup football is different from other years in many ways. In 2022, the FIFA World Cup was played in one country, but this year it is being staged across four different time zones covering three countries (Mexico, Canada and the USA). 48 teams instead of 32 and several new rules, such as a hydration time break, make this game more diverse and inclusive than before. Games such as this will always feature moments of individual brilliance, moments of fortune or misfortune, and moments of controversy and incompetence, but in the end it is the Darwinian idea and Herbert Spencer’s thought about the survival of the fittest that win the cup.

In his book, Waiting for Godot, Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett depicts how Vladimir and Estragon spend their days waiting for someone named Godot, who they believe will provide them with salvation. They passed the time with conversation, physical routine and musings, but that hope faded away as Godot never arrived. This means the characters spent time in a state of existential uncertainty. While the game is progressing and players are playing, they have to leave behind all sorts of uncertainties. So, football can sometimes act like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. As critic Vivian Marcier famously described the masterpiece, ‘a play in which nothing happens twice’.

In addition to Beckett’s depiction of uncertainty, I now turn to philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, in his book Critique of Dialectical Reason, discussed the nature of organisation, where he turned to football. Sartre mentioned the ‘praxis’ of the individual player—the free action or activity, which is integrated into it, where the collective action of the group permits the refinement of individual action through immersion into the organisational structure of the team. Sartre’s attention is based on the fact that in football, an organisation shapes the relation between individual and collective action in the constantly shifting and dynamic form. It is to be noted that the individual motions of each player are predetermined, which is governed by their role in the field, such as goalkeeper, midfielder or central defender, but this individual function finds “elevation and transcendence in the collaborative, creative practice of a team that plays well together; and when a team does not play well together, then collective action collapses into its atomised, individual parts and the whole thing falls apart; players blame each other and the fans turn on individual players.”

Sartre’s observation leads us to believe that the essentially collaborative nature of football extends to the patterns of some form of sociability amongst the players. This pattern of sociability also transcended and echoed in the collective life of the fans. So far eight countries (Brazil, Germany, Italy, Argentina, France, Uruguay, England and Spain) have won the World Cup, but the last World Cup final was watched on television by almost half of the planet’s population. The reason why football is so popular to so many of us is precisely because of the experience of association at its heart and the sense of community that it renders. We can compare it with Karl Marx’s socius, where football is a movement of the socius, the free association of human beings. Bill Shankly, the former Liverpool football manager, once said, “The socialism I believe in is not really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the way to live and be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day.” This sentiment is also shared by Brazilian legend Socrates or Argentinian captain Xavier Zanetti.

Besides the collaborative nature of football, German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer, in his book Truth and Method, furnishes a way of describing the claims, thoughts and judgements that are made in the arts and humanities. Gadamer’s argument begins with an account of play. The main point he raised is that it is the game that is played, not the subject who plays the game. This means it is not a question of individual consciousness that is residing on an objective playing field; rather, we leave behind subjects and objects. Even players have to lose themselves in play and not play the game in their heads. This reminds me of what Indian saint Vivekananda once said, “Life is a game; play it.” The players know that the game is playing and know, moreover, that the game is playful.

In short, there is a philosophical connection between Waiting for Godot and football. Both explore the human desire for a resolution that never arrives, which leads to anticipation and cyclical patterns. Uncertainty is embedded within the game. Sartre’s observation of the collaborative nature of football and Gadamer’s ‘game to be played’ should not be undermined by the individual player’s performance. ‘Socius’ in Marxist theory can bind players together and provide a structure for play.
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The writer is a UK-based academic who writes on science, philosophy and education