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Belief
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5 min read

Is Goodison Park a place of worship?

Delve beyond the identity and the inspiration.

Henry Corbett, a vicar in Liverpool and chaplain to Everton Football Club.  

  

Football fans wearing blue stand and watch a match in a stadium.
Everton fans hope.
Everton F.C.

In some places football is considered a religion. No more so than in Liverpool. Its citizens revere not just one team but two - the Blues and the Reds.  

It's a divided city. Some wear the blue of Everton FC, others the red of Liverpool FC. A mere mile separates the stadia where supporters pay homage to their heroes.  

As the chaplain to Everton, I often contemplate this devotion. Is Everton’s stadium Goodison Park a place of worship? And is football really a religion?  

The quick answer is “Yes” and “No”. Goodison Park is surely a place of worship, and football is not a religion, though that second answer may need a bit of a defence.  

That football grounds are places of worship is instanced at every game played: chants of praise are sung and worth is given to the players, the team, the history, the manager, maybe even the owner.  

Goodison Park has hosted games since 1892. The attendance at the ground’s opening was 12,000, the cost £3,000, and the point of it all? Everton Football Club had begun in 1878 as St Domingo’s, founded by a Methodist minister. The Rev Ben Swift Chambers wanted to keep his St Domingo’s Church cricket team fit during the winter, and the cricket team was to help young men stay away from less worthy pursuits. Similarly, Manchester City was founded by Anna Connell, the vicar’s daughter, to keep young men on the streets of East Manchester away from trouble.   

St Domingo’s then became Everton FC and later came the move to the new stadium on Goodison Road. The crowds brought gate receipts, the players and staff needed wages, and football clearly becomes a business as well as an activity to help young men avoid trouble.  

Then and now the game is entertaining, the outcome is unpredictable, and the players can show outstanding skills, athleticism, courage, resilience, teamwork.   

That’s where the worship naturally comes in. Awe and wonder are important human attributes, and Evertonians have delighted in the skills and character of players down the club’s 147-year history. At every football ground there will be chants for players that celebrate their skill, character, achievements, giving worth to their ability. And yes, there may also be chants doing the opposite of worship to the opponents and to the unlucky referee just trying to do their job. The team is celebrated and worshipped, sometimes in language that is hard to believe: “We’re by far the greatest team the world has ever seen” can feel like undeserved worship when Everton are struggling to avoid relegation. Such optimistic sentiment may reflect Evertonians’ awareness of the importance of history and the bigger picture! Another chant begins “And if you know your history...”.   

Outside Goodison Park is a statue of Dixie Dean: he scored 60 league goals in the 1927-28 season and his ability and achievement is worshipped, given great worth, by many before and after a game. The other statue outside the ground is of the “Holy Trinity”, Howard Kendall, Alan Ball and Colin Harvey, the midfield three that helped bring the League title to Everton in 1970. Many such players in the history of the club have received and still receive worship. Goodison Park is a place of hope, frustration, joy, anguish, and, yes, of worship.  

But is football a religion? Goodison Park is called by some a cathedral, the club has fans, it conveys an identity, the game offers principles for living such as teamwork and the valuing of different gifts.   

Yes, football is like a religion, and understandably religious language and gesture are often used around the game. “Salvation!” says the commentator as Graham Stuart scores the winning goal in the 3-2 win over Wimbledon to keep Everton in the Premier League. Television cameras can home in on a supporter clasping their hands in prayer at some decisive moment.   

And yes, football can play a part in someone’s life that is very like the part a religion can play: it can become the most important thing, it can shape mood, behaviour, it can provide long-lasting rituals.  

But it is one thing for football to be like a religion in some respects, it is another for it genuinely to qualify as a religion.   

This of course begs the question “how are you defining religion?” I am going for the stronger definition. So, I’m not agreeing with a statement such as “shopping is your religion”. I would rather say “shopping is one of your passions, interests, maybe overriding interests, but no, not a religion”. Some of the stronger dictionary definitions include “A system of beliefs, symbols and practices that addresses the nature of existence”, and “the way people deal with ultimate concerns about their life” and “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe”.   

Does football meet those definitions, does football answer the deepest questions of life?  

Who am I? An Evertonian, but deeper than that, who am I?   

What is the purpose of my life beyond hoping Everton win football matches?   

What happens after death?   

Football does not address those ultimate concerns. It is like a religion in offering identity, inspiring worship, having a gathering point like Goodison Park for communal activity, but it is not a religion as it does not address those ultimate questions.  

I will be going to worship the skills and characters of players, coaches, staff and manager at Goodison Park before the season ends, but I don’t see my love of football as a religion. The Christian faith is my religion: it addresses the deepest questions, the ultimate concerns, just as other religions seek to do.   

There is more to life than football. As an Everton manager, a practising Catholic, Carlo Ancelotti once said: “Football is the most important of the less important things”.  

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Explainer
Belief
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Politics
7 min read

The peripheries of belief: how faith shaped the north’s identity

Northern spirituality’s rebellious capacity to adapt is still in play today

Tom Rippon is Assistant Editor at Roots for Churches, an ecumenical charity.

Dark clouds over Durham Cathedral
Durham Cathedral and town.
David Connor on Unsplash.

2025 has so far been the year of the north. At its start, we were treated to the plasticine escapades of Wallace and Gromit, whose unabashed northern-ness was enough to faze American TV executives. Then in April, the story turned to northern industrial decline when Scunthorpe steelworks hit the headlines, prompting last-minute state intervention. In May, the local elections saw the astonishing rise of Reform across areas previously dominated by Labour. Taken together, these three moments encapsulate the range of associations often evoked by life on the periphery of England: regional pride, good-natured humour, close communities, economic precarity and hard graft. 

The north is a landscape of contraries and co-existence, where sweeping fells and dark skies meet red-brick chimneys and rolling waves of terraced houses.   As David Barnett puts it, it is “a place made up of individuals, bound by an ethereal quality that is at once a myth and, conversely, as real as grit and graft.’  

Hard to pin down, yet real once seen, the same could also be said for the faith that has filled the region with a multitude of expressions to this day. 

Of course, when we talk about ‘the north’, we mean everything and everyone from the conurbations of Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the Lake District and Northumberland, where centuries of border warfare have left a plethora of castles and fortified houses (‘pele towers’). Two landscapes dominated by buildings which have long lost their original purposes. Perhaps the principal shared characteristic of these communities is a sense of distance from mainstream political and cultural life (just try catching a train that isn’t heading to London). But with distance comes an independence of identity and a proud sense of cultural distinctiveness.  If anything, the only thing that can be definitively said about northern identity is that it is the quality of being ‘not southern’.   

Northern Christianity has not escaped this wavering relationship with the south.  In 664 AD, the Northumbrian Church gathered at Whitby for a meeting presided over by King Oswy of Northumbria and the Abbess Hilda of Whitby.  It was quite literally a pivotal moment for the early Church and the north more widely.  The matter at hand was whether Northumbrian Christianity, then centred on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, should remain orientated towards Celtic Christianity, which had as its principal focal point the abbey of Iona, or whether to turn towards Rome and its growing mission in the south, headquartered in Canterbury.  North or south?  Canterbury or Iona?   

In the end, the group opted for closer links with the Roman Church.  Yet the Christian faith in the north remained distinctive, blending the older influences of St Columba and St Aidan with the new ones coming up from the south.  Lindisfarne Priory remained a centre for Christian life in the north and its prestige led it to accumulate the wealth that eventually precipitated its own destruction by Viking raids in 793 AD. In spite of this, the northern saints drew reverent pilgrims for centuries to come, as the grandeur and scale of Durham Cathedral, the burial place of St Cuthbert, testifies to this day. 

Behind the independent northern spirit lies a long history of political, economic and spiritual divergence from the south. Northern spirituality is characterised by a sustained distinctive flowering of the Christian faith that intertwines itself with the social identity of the peoples and places of the north.  The region’s response to the religious reforms of Henry VIII was the Pilgrimage of Grace, which protested both his break from the Roman Catholic Church and socio-economic policies implemented by the king and his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.   

By the seventeenth century, faith in the north had taken on a distinctly reformist hue as non-conformism – that is, churches and sects not aligned with the Church of England, the Church of the state and the establishment – flourished in the region. The beginnings of the Quaker movement can be traced to an open-air sermon given by the reformer George Fox in 1652 on Firbank Fell, near Sedburgh in modern Cumbria - the crag he spoke from is still known as Fox’s pulpit - while other reformist movements, including Methodism, Congregationalism and Presbyterians, also drew increasing crowds with their passionate preaching in fields, moors and disparate farming communities. 

The very landscape of northern England, often challenging and remote, drew its inhabitants away from both socio-political centres and the established Church, nurturing forms of belief in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which were as independent as those of seventh- and eighth-century Northumbria. Much of religious life in the region was organised around a large parish church that served numerous small communities spread across a large area.  Living at such distances, no wonder people felt a disconnect from the parish church and the national Church it represented. Non-conformist chapels and meeting houses quickly spread across the landscape, particularly in remote villages outside of the control of major landowners and Church authorities. As David Petts argues, the building of chapels expressed the collective economic and organisational independence of rural labourers and miners, and united dispersed communities through collective endeavour. 

The region has proved itself capable of delivering considerable shocks to the London political establishment. 

Once the chapel was built, they would prove valuable training grounds for rethinking the political organisation of the poor; the significance of non-conformism thus lay not only in its spiritual divergence from the establishment, but also in its fostering of alternative political systems. Methodism in particular was to provide an ideological and practical template for mass movements such as Chartism, which campaigned for social reform and an expansion of democratic suffrage in the mid-nineteenth century. Chartist campaigners called themselves ‘missionaries’ and crisscrossed the country preaching ‘the gospel of Chartism’ and forming Chartist congregations. Their political vision found a receptive audience in the working population of the industrialised north, who were raised on the non-conformist emphasis on Christ as the carpenter’s son and a poor man, one who worked for his living as they did. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the non-conformist social Gospel produced notable reformers such as the journalist W. T. Stead, born  in rural Northumberland as the son of a Congregationalist minister, and the Quaker confectioner Joseph Rowntree of York. 

Amidst the darkness, grime and crushing conditions of nineteenth-century mills and mines, the Christian message of mutual aid and fellowship, first articulated by the early Church, again found expression. In Manchester, the Methodist Central Hall served a dual purpose, providing a space for worship on Sundays and a community space during the week, when it offered libraries, food, clothing, shelter, childcare and even entertainment to the people of the city. 

Social reform and the Christian faith buttressed one another across the region and together resisted the fractures, pressures and degradations that industrialisation exerted on the communities they served. The social values of these interdependent movements left a lasting impact on the modern political landscape of the region, until recently known as Labour’s ‘Red Wall’. As any political correspondent will tell you, northern politics can no longer be taken for granted and the region has proved itself capable of delivering considerable shocks to the London political establishment.  Walking through these communities, left behind by deindustrialisation, globalisation and our periodic post-crisis recoveries, the air seems pervaded by a sense of unravelling as the old bonds and certainties slowly slip-away. The Church is not immune to these processes and the north follows the overall national trend of declining church attendance. The empty chapels testify as much to the seismic shifts taking place in the region as the empty warehouses and factories. 

But if the history of Christianity in the north tells us anything, then it is that northern spirituality has never stood still. It has an ingenious capacity to adapt, to regenerate itself to meet the challenges faced by each generation. The challenges are varied and specific to each community, but the Church is there. In Burnley, the fight of the early disciples against urban poverty is echoed in the work of the Church on the Street, whilst on Holy Island itself, the Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin is a driving force behind the Holy Island 2050 project, which aims to assure the sustainability of the Island community in the face of depopulation and rural precarity. 

If the dominant atmosphere in the north is one of feeling left behind, then the Christian call to reach out to those around us is needed more than ever. More than one thousand years separate St Aidan from us, but the Christian faith can still help the us to navigate the challenges and precarities of a changing world.

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