One Cup Final Day a fan makes his way to his seat, right next to the halfway line. The seat next to him is unoccupied, so he leans across the space and asks his neighbour if someone will be sitting there. ‘No’, says the neighbour, ‘it’s empty’. ‘Incredible’, says the fan, ‘who in their right mind would have a seat like this for the Final and not use it?’. ‘Well actually’, his neighbour says, ‘the seat belongs to me. I always come here with my wife, but she passed away. This is the first Cup Final we’ve missed since we married in 1967’. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. That’s terrible. But couldn’t you find someone else, a friend or relative, or even a neighbour, to take the seat?’ The man shakes his head: ‘No. They’re all at the funeral.’

I don’t think our Jewish Burial Societies yet know that you can now buy two-tone themed coffins in the colours of one’s football club. They come complete with the club insignia etched fetchingly into the coffin lid. Apparently there are other kinds of themes available – motorbike motifs, Union Jacks, dolphins, angels, and more – but the striped football coffins outsell them all. Perhaps this is an ironic tribute to the Liverpool manager Bill Shankly’s oft-quoted remark from the 1960s: ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life or death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’ Forty years on, that off-the-cuff comment from the gruff Scot appears more and more like a Zen koan.

All the chaplains writing in 'Footballing Lives: As seen by Chaplains in the Beautiful Game' disagree, in one sense, with Shankly. Christians to a man – plus a solitary token, woman – they see their work with clubs large and small, from Manchester United to Rushden & Diamonds as being to help players, backroom staff, management and fans recognize that pastoral and spiritual support is available for a whole range of human experiences. These include serious illness, hospitalization, bereavements, addiction to alcohol or gambling, domestic and family troubles, violence, suicide of friends and they all transcend the dramas on the pitch. From this perspective, the dramas and vicissitudes of the human condition mock the significance we give to a mere sport.

Yet these devotees of the game also testify to ways in which, in the thirty years since the first chaplain was appointed to a club – there are now more than seventy within the ninety-two league clubs – the huge media-and-money-driven business of football has created new opportunities for attending to the emotional and spiritual needs of the ‘communities’ that congregate around clubs. By taking their faith and its values, and their commitment to the individual, outside the formal institution that pays them – chaplains are not employees of the clubs, but of a variety of church organizations – they can speak to, and work with, people where they are, not where the Church might wish them to be.