Football Unites Us

Football Unites Us | The Beautiful Game | Thiago Silva | Part 1

By Noah Solovey

It’s the same reason for all of us: We love football because the sport brings us together; it’s more than just a game. It’s an emotional rollercoaster ride with ups and downs, highs and lows, and family. It’s a sport that has forever united fans together. When your team loses, it’s not you who feels sorrow. The fans and you, together, all feeling the sorrow of a loss. It’s our job to stick by each other's sides during the hardest of hard times. And it’s not only a beautiful game for the passionate fans who do everything for their club, it’s the players, too, who devote their lives to football. Their beloved sport is their religion. The players and the fans are never completely separated, whether the barriers that isolate the fans from the players or something else, because both eventually link together and feel everything as one team. This link-up happens pretty often- and recently, Thiago Silva has brought us all together in a whirlpool of feelings.

Some players just have this powerful forever-surrounding aura that magnifies fans in, and then when that magnetic pull has to give up finally, the fans that it pulled in all feel that they are missing something important, and it brings emotion. It’s like elements on the periodic table that feel a need to attach to another element- and if it doesn’t there may be a chemical reaction; that’s the analogical connection to fans and players. 

Thiago Silva played at Chelsea FC for four years. Though it was a short amount of time, there was something special about his connection to the club. Because even though his prime was at Paris-Saint-Germain, he had his kids join the Chelsea academy, and in his emotional farewell speech he said, “I dream that one day my kids will play for [Chelsea]” Throughout this speech he shed tear after tear, and if you looked at the jumbotron you would have seen fans too, shedding emotional tears. I do not support Chelsea FC, but my respect for the club is immense. The fans had such an enormous connection with Thiago Silva and that is hard to do, as football is a game.

Thiago Silva had a major language barrier with his players and the fans, but he wanted his farewell speech and emotions to be heard, so he took the time to write it on his phone and read it out loud in English. In these types of player-fan connections, we see that football isn’t only a game. It’s more than a game. It’s a beautiful competitive sport that brings people together, and who doesn’t love that? Liverpool FC when Jurgen Klopp left once stated, “We know we didn’t win the league this year, but all in all, this means more.”