Quotes of the Day

The night after I finished my high school exams, I stayed up till dawn celebrating and then caught a plane to Munich. It was June 25, 1988, and the Netherlands were playing the U.S.S.R. in the European Championship final. I am not Dutch, but I had grown up football-mad in a small Dutch town. My parents paid for my flight as a graduation present, and that afternoon, on no sleep, I was among tens of thousands of orange-clad Dutchmen striding toward the Olympic Stadium through an otherwise deserted Munich. Absurd as it sounds, we experienced the day — and that whole glorious European Championship — as a symbolic reversal of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. This time an orange army was invading Germany and subjugating the natives. Four days earlier, the Dutch had beaten West Germany in the semifinal. People chanted: In 1940 they came In 1988 we came Holadiay, holadio.

The Netherlands duly dismissed the Soviets, as we thought of them then, 2-0. With only a couple of minutes left to play, green-clad German military policemen stationed themselves on the athletic track, glaring up at us. This was standard procedure: they were there to prevent us from invading the pitch on the final whistle. Yet if you were Dutch in the Olympic Stadium that day, these were the bogeymen of the past. Tens of thousands of people forgot the match — the first championship the Netherlands had ever won — and jeered the poor policemen. It was the sort of passionate communal spirit that you rarely experience these days outside of football grounds.

When the match ended, I hugged a Dutchman behind me, and then went off to sleep on the floor of Munich train station. It was my first foreign football pilgrimage. I have since traveled tens of thousands of miles to attend hundreds of football matches all over the world.

But that's nothing. There is a whole tribe of North European men, known as "groundhoppers," generally recognizable by their gray shorts, white legs and knee socks, who spend their holidays visiting little grounds around Europe and arguing about how they compare with, say, a favorite provincial Finnish stadium first spotted in 1971. There are fans who arrange to have their ashes scattered in their club's stadium after they die. Others visit stadiums even when there is no match. In Munich, they still come by the thousands each year just to gaze at the empty Olympic Stadium. The Barcelona Football Club's museum — not even counting the adjoining Nou Camp stadium, with its almost 100,000 capacity — attracts more visitors than any of the city's other museums.

In the flowery language of the sporting press, football grounds are "temples," "cathedrals" or "meccas." Comparing football to religion is a soft-headed cliché. The truth is more extreme: Western Europe may have reached the point where football passion outstrips religion, class warfare, nationalism, even ethnic hatred. It now just borrows some of the language to make matches more fun.

Both stadiums and cathedrals are edifices where crowds gather to glimpse a higher beauty, to feel part of something larger than themselves. But for many West Europeans — most of whom don't follow any religion — it is the stadium that arouses more passion. While the stadium is often overflowing with fans, Europe's churches are emptying and being converted into bingo halls and mosques. The stadium cheers, chants, even cries. The congregations in many European churches are often silent, or mumble prayers and hymns without discernible feeling. True religious spirit may be deeper and more sustaining than anything available at the stadium — you'd have to ask someone else about that — but the pitch is where many find otherworldly contemporary beauty (a lob by Ronaldinho, a dribble by Zidane). The cathedral, in contrast, seems the aesthetic of a bygone era. And the stadium has even replaced the cathedral as the home of civic pride: week by week, Barcelona gets more global coverage and admiration for its football club than for Gaudí's Sagrada Família.

Hardly anybody visits football grounds for their architectural charm. Most of these edifices have simple, short-back-and-sides designs. Even well-designed ones are ignored. Munich's Olympic Stadium, for instance, has a half-open roof supported by pylons that looks a bit like a giant tent. The architect, Gunter Behnisch, who had begun his architectural studies as a prisoner of war in Britain, had originally shown Munich's town council a lady's stocking stretched across some sticks. Yet on that June afternoon in 1988, I doubt that a single Dutchman noticed. The architecture has never been the point. Even the celebrated Swiss architect Jacques Herzog, who, with his partner Pierre de Meuron, won the Pritzker Prize, the profession's Nobel, told me: "The stadia I love — Anfield or Old Trafford in England — are ugly on the outside. When the ground is packed, the people become the architecture." That day in Munich, that's what we were.

What you retain from years of visiting stadiums are those moments when the crowd expresses a communal emotion that is either startling in its intensity, or plain surprising. Like the time in Newcastle in 1998, when one of the most partisan crowds in football gave an ovation to the teenage Liverpool striker Michael Owen for scoring a hat trick against their team. Or the ferocity of 100,000 Catalans in Nou Camp when Real Madrid visit: waving Catalan flags and raging against Real as if this were still the 1940s, Real were still General Franco's team, and Catalonia were still subjugated. Or, for sheer venom, an "Old Firm" match between Glasgow's crosstown rivals, Rangers and Celtic. A football ground is a good place to witness hard feelings, but nothing beats the Old Firm game, which is best described as "90 Minutes of Hate." Protestants traditionally support Rangers, and Catholics, Celtic. The one time I went (never again) I stood at the Celtic end, listening to the people around me chant, "Oh Ah, Up the Ra!" in praise of the i.r.a., while the Rangers fans facing us sang "Noooo Pope of Rome!"

I used to think football grounds were the place to uncover Western Europe's suppressed ethnic, religious, regional and class tensions. Then one day in Glasgow I met a Celtic fan named Roddy McKay who cheerfully admitted shouting the most outrageous anti-Protestant abuse at Old Firm matches. He had even named his second son after the entire Celtic team of the day. ("The subs wouldn't fit on the birth certificate," he grumbled.) It sounded like the usual story — except that this man was married to a Protestant. Just after his wife gave birth, he had sneaked to the town hall to name his son. The poor woman, who supported Rangers, kicked the sitting-room door off its hinges when she found out. McKay showed me a picture of his son at two days old, dressed in the Celtic home shirt, in the arms of an elder brother who was wearing the Celtic away shirt. "Put it this way," McKay crowed, "he'll never play for Rangers."

To this man, who does not believe in God, the Old Firm game is no longer about religion. Nor is it to many other Old Firm fans: almost half the Scottish Catholics who marry now do so across religious divides. In other words, Celtic and Rangers fans may still shout sectarian slogans at football matches — and some still take their bigotry beyond full time — but most no longer mean it.

And this is true all over Western Europe. In the past, the passions on display in a European football stadium really did reflect religious or class or regional sentiments. Just as Barcelona used to stand for Catalan nationalism, so the Milan-Inter derby set the migrant working classes against the city's own middle classes, while the Dutch in 1988 still carried around a war trauma about Germans. But today, these passions have weakened. Europeans have ceased to believe in God, class divides have narrowed, and while there is now more regionalist chest thumping than ever, it is hard to be quite so fanatical about it now that countries like Spain are decentralized democracies and regions like Catalonia could choose independence if they really wanted.

So when Barcelona fans wave Catalan flags, or Glaswegian fans sing sectarian songs, they are reaching for traditional symbols to express a football rivalry. For that father in Glasgow, his feelings about the city's football clubs were stronger than any sectarian feeling he brought to the game. The chants in a football stadium today are no longer proxies for other passions. Football has become a cause in itself.

And the new stadiums are no longer built as afterthoughts — barns to house the devoted. Rather, they are starting to become as beautiful as cathedrals. Herzog says that his Basel football stadium, which he built at the same time as creating London's Tate Modern art gallery, "was the first of the new football stadia to be built by a famous architect. The other European grounds were strictly commercial projects." His firm, Herzog & de Meuron, is now building a new stadium in Munich for the 2006 World Cup. The stadium will glow on the outside when there is a match on inside. "The idea is that the energy of the people, of the sportsmen, surges outside," explains Herzog. You can imagine, centuries from now, tourists with guidebooks coming to study the ruins, trying to understand what it was that got 21st century Europeans so worked up.

• Visiting the temples of football