Worshipping at a new altar

It is often claimed that sport makes the world a better place, but sporting fervour has triggered more conflicts than it has ended, and the idea this new religion encourages the virtues of fair play or respect are without foundation.

ON FEBRUARY 13th, 80 million Pakistanis were getting ready to vote in their country's parliamentary elections, 60,000 families were confirmed to have been affected by major flooding in Bolivia, and roughly 26,500 children died of preventable diseases in the developing world (as they do every day, according to UN estimates).

Oh, and a 68-year-old Italian working for a professional football club in Austria was named manager of the Irish soccer team.

Needless to say, only one of these stories made the front pages of our national newspapers (including this one) the next day. And only one drew extensive comment from a western head of government. Within minutes of news breaking of Giovanni Trapattoni's appointment, Bertie Ahern was on RTÉ Radio's Drivetime, speaking with a rare sense of purpose.

"Okay, the Austrian league may not be Europe's strongest league, but still it's a formidable league and with Red Bull in Salzburg up to last season he did very well . . . He was with AC for over a decade - a long time ago, admittedly. He was a defensive midfielder, always known - that I recall - in his European days is that his teams mightn't get many goals but you sure didn't get many past him." So the Taoiseach continued for seven (yes, I counted them) minutes, going on to accurately rattle off the win-lose-draw stats of "Stevie" (as Ahern insisted on calling him) Staunton, and conveying an intimate knowledge of the Republic of Ireland's Group Eight opponents in the 2010 Fifa World Cup qualifying tournament. "I have to say, we have to be realistic. If anyone thinks that Georgia, or Montenegro, or Bulgaria, or Cyprus - again - or any of these matches, are going to be easy matches, I tell you they won't. We are in a tough group, of course not to mention Italy . . . "

It is hard to think of an occasion down the years where Mr Ahern spoke with more verve and conviction. Just where does he get the time to keep up with developments in the Austrian Bundesliga? By so playing up his sporting credentials, the Taoiseach was following a long political tradition. Since the dawn of mass-spectator sports, political leaders from Benito Mussolini to Kim Jong-il have sought to exploit public fervour surrounding popular games for their benefit. Adolf Hitler used the 1936 Olympics to rehabilitate his public image.

Thaksin Shinawatra bought Manchester City last year to boost his chances of regaining power in his native Thailand. George W Bush cultivated an "Ordinary Joe" persona by religiously watching Monday Night Footballon ESPN (occasionally while eating/choking on pretzels). And, during his term of office as British prime minister, Tony Blair hammed up his "common man" credentials by advertising his love for Newcastle FC - once memorably as a panellist on the BBC's Football Focus(not unlike the Taoiseach, who once showed up on RTÉ's The Premiership).

ATHEIST PHILOSOPHERRichard Dawkins has argued - with a hint of despair - that someone who doesn't believe in God has little chance nowadays of being elected to high office. But what of someone who doesn't support a Premier League team? Or, God forbid, someone who fails to possess a set of golf clubs? The comparison here between sport and religion is deliberate - sport is increasingly resembling a faith-based system of worshipp. This is especially true in Ireland, where the sports bar has largely replaced the sacristy, and the post-match analyst the priest.

Since the late 1980s, Mass attendances in "Catholic" Ireland have been decreasing almost in direct proportion to the rising demand for Dubs tickets. In 2005, a World Cup qualifying game between the Republic of Ireland and Switzerland attracted almost twice as many Irish viewers as the Pope's funeral. Is no one else shocked by the €1.35 billion price-tag recently put on Setanta Sports? It must be worth more now than RTÉ. Global figures indicate that one in five people watched some of the last Fifa World Cup - which means football alone has more recorded followers than either Christianity or Islam today.

As well as muscling in on traditional worshipping patterns, sport is increasingly appropriating the language of religion. Without irony, athletes are spoken of as gods, and golf shots as miracles. The Olympics, and other such international sporting events, are imbued with a supposed power to unite the peoples of the earth, and bring peace and harmony and goodwill, in a way only the man above used to be able to do.

"What is soccer if not everything that religion should be," wrote one sports journalist on the eve of the 2006 Fifa World Cup. Rhetoric like this is as commonplace today as grace-before-meal was 20 years ago.

The truth is, there is little to celebrate in sport. And I say this as someone who strongly held the faith for many years. I've spent some of my formative days in dimly lit snooker halls, and some of my happiest ones on a river, rowing for my college team. I retain sporting moments that mark out the chapters of my life better than any biography, from a school sports-day relay medal (courtesy of a courageous last leg in the 4x50m) to a photo of myself standing next to the Red Rum statue at Aintree, which was taken by my late father during a precious bonding trip to the races.

I know, in other words, that sport can be great fun. It can bring people together and even give meaning to people's lives. But is it especially equipped to do so? And are those lives that depend on sport full or satisfying ones? The main problem with sport is that it is sustained by a series of myths, including the legend that sport was born of Corinthian purity and has since been sullied by "unsporting" professionalism (a theory that is quickly debunked when you compare the levels of violence, and especially the frequency of punch-ups, in rugby and soccer during the amateur era compared to the present one).

Perhaps the greatest myth in sport is that it "builds character", turning waifs and delinquents into pillars of society. This theory is sustained by countless anecdotes of the "sport made me a man" variety. But research in the area shows that competitive game-playing is actually bad for your morals, not good. In the words of pioneering sports psychologists Brenda Jo Bredemeier and David L Shields, serious sport creates "lower level moral reasoning in both sport and life".

BUT DON'T JUSTtake their word for it. Nor indeed mine. "It's a fairly mythical idea that sport develops traditional virtues like fair play, social cohesion, and respect for opponents," says Prof Aidan Moran, a leading Irish sports psychologist and an occasional mind-coach to golfer Padraig Harrington. "Even in amateur sports, we can give lots of examples of cheating, distortion of the rules and disrespect." Prof Moran argues that sport can only play a role in character development if it is accompanied by a rigorous process of self-examination, or philosophical and moral instruction. He suggests parents in particular have unrealistic expectations about the value of sport, believing "something magical happens in between the time [their children] are dropped off and collected from training".

A further myth relating to sport is that it is somehow helping to ease conflict or "break down barriers" between different people. The International Olympic Committee is partly responsible for sustaining this myth, proclaiming its role to be one of "helping to build a peaceful and better world". The world footballing body Fifa similarly claims to be "making the world a better place through football".

In truth, sporting fervour has triggered more conflicts than it has ended. Sport has sometimes directly caused bloodshed, and frequently acted as a safe haven for forms of intolerance and hatred long since dispatched from other realms of society. In fact, it could be argued that sport is a last refuge for racism, sexism, homophobia, animal cruelty, and perhaps bad language too.

It is also a refuge for stupidity, the sort of unashamed, primeval stupidity that sees grown men dancing around in silly costumes and falling down drunk. (I should know, I have done it myself on occasion.)

WORST OF ALL, perhaps, is sport's propensity to distract us from the things that really matter. A bit of escapism is fine. Even taoisigh are entitled to some time out. But, judging by the way in which sport - and especially spectator sport - has become so ubiquitous, you have to wonder whether we have escaped reality altogether.

Ironically, one of the few organisations in the State to question our addiction to sport has been the Catholic Church. Conscious of the growing competition for hearts and minds on the Sabbath, Catholic bishops recently urged the GAA to reschedule Sunday matches and training to avoid clashes with religious services. The public response was entirely predictable: some gentle coughing and then back to business as usual.

Where, indeed, can one find serious reflection about sport? Hardly within the ranks of sporting pundits. TV "analysts" and other professional commentators, with a few rare exceptions, tend to trade in platitudes. Most of them misleadingly depict phenomena such as doping, greed and excessive violence as aberrations in high-level sport whereas, in fact, they are inherent to it.

The result is that we have difficulty seeing the wood for the trees. We think it is great, for example, that 20,000 people turn up to watch a schools rugby match in Donnybrook. Great? It is completely obscene to have such a mob screaming and yelping at a bunch of kids. Let's face it, schools sport - at a competitive level - is mainly about parents living out their fantasies through their children.

We also fail to ask just what it is we trade off for the time we spend watching, talking about, gambling upon or otherwise engaging in sport. We fail to ask, for example, whether there is any downside to the proliferation of what Umberto Eco calls "sports chatter"? Eco, a native of sports-mad Italy, certainly has his concerns, suggesting that talking about sport is a way of feigning engagement with politics.

Addressing the typical fan, he says: "Instead of judging the job done by the minister of finance (for which you have to know about economics, among other things), you discuss the job done by the coach; instead of criticising the record of parliament you criticise the record of athletes . . . "

Which brings us back to the Taoiseach, media hysteria over the Trapattoni appointment, and the way in which sport is generally encroaching further and further on the public consciousness.

Sport, like any religion, has the potential to make the world a better place - but perhaps only if we stop taking it so seriously.

• Foul Play: What's Wrong With Sport by Joe Humphreys is published this weekend by Icon Books.