Mission to Burnley

Sports and religion in a post-Christian society

One thing I’m anticipating in early 2024 is getting to co-teach our History and Politics of Sports class with my friend Chris Moore. I taught it solo in 2022, and when we debuted the course together two years earlier… well, you all remember what happened in the spring of 2020.

So it’s like starting over, as Chris and I collaborate again on a general education class that we thought would give Bethel students a chance to see our disciplines, their world, and themselves from a different perspective. Whether or not those students play or even enjoy sports, studying everything from baseball to water polo also lets them learn about topics like celebrity, diplomacy, gender, globalization, media, modernization, organized labor, public policy, racism, and, yes, religion.

On that last topic, I’m sure we’ll go beyond the many examples available in American sports to talk about what the rest of the world knows as football. I’ve written about this before, but since today is a significant day in the British footballing calendar, let me revisit the role of religion in the Premier League.

Actually, make that roles, plural.

Burnley Football Club have played at Turf Moor since 1883 - CC BY 2.0 (Adam Haworth)

Among the many “festive fixtures”¹ today in the world’s leading soccer league, mighty Liverpool drives an hour northeast to take on tiny Burnley. Apart from proximity and antiquity, the two clubs don’t have much in common. Liverpool are perennial powers in English football, having won 19 first division titles, 8 FA cups, and 9 League cups since starting play in 1892, plus a total of 13 European trophies — most recently a 2019 Champions League win over my favorite club, Tottenham Hotspur. Burnley are ten years older and claimed their first and only FA cup a few months before the outbreak of World War I. They did win England’s top division in 1960, but have bounced back and forth between the Premier League and the second-tier Championship for most of this century.

In a new documentary produced by Britain’s Sky Sports and airing in the U.S. on Peacock, we follow the Clarets from relegation last spring to revival under new manager Vincent Kompany, a former Belgian international who captained Manchester City to four Premier League titles in the 2010s.² Back in the top flight for 2023-24, Burnley are in danger of dropping again. But two of their three wins have come in the last five matches, including a 2-0 result at Fulham on Saturday.

So, what does any of this have to do with religion?

Like many English clubs, Liverpool originated in a Christian church — specifically, a Methodist chapel in the city’s Everton neighborhood.³ Some of that early culture even survives in England’s national football tournament. If the Reds return to the FA Cup next spring, they’ll hear fans at Wembley Stadium singing the hymn “Abide with Me,” a tradition going back to 1927.